While educational technology innovation offers exciting new possibilities, it also raises ethical questions around accessibility, sustainability, and responsible use. The field has, however, struggled to engage with these types of complex questions and the uncomfortable tensions they generate.

Considering educational technology, not as a toolset but instead as an intra-active practice offers a possible path forward. Barad (2003, p. 817) explained: It is through specific intra-actions that a differential sense of being is enacted in the ongoing ebb and flow of agency. That is, it is through specific intra-actions that phenomena come to matter — in both senses of the word.

Intra-activity represents ongoing technological processes of both making and being made. It de-emphasizes the importance of scientific and technological ‘things,’ and instead centers questions of how we make and are made. From a socio-material perspective, therefore, it is through our actions that EdTech ethics come to matter (Elias, 2022).

Building on these concepts, as part of our development of a Digital Literacy Microcredential for educators at VCC, we have begun building a Competency Framework for Ethical Action when using digital practice, tools and services. The framework outlines what we hope educational technology users will do at foundational, intermediate, advanced and highly specialized levels of proficiency. In this session, we will share the work that we have completed to date and invite participants to actively engage with the framework and, perhaps, to challenge, extend, change and/ or re-make their own ethical beliefs in the process.

References:

Barad, K. (2003) ‘Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter’, Signs: Journal of women in culture and society, 28(3), pp. 801-831.

Elias, T. (2022). Working with/in the tensions: Educational technology as feminized craftwork. Digital culture & education, 14(4).

Karen Brooke is the department head of the School of Instructor Education at Vancouver Community College
Tanya Elias is an Education Developer, Learning Specialist at Vancouver Community College

Jacquie Harrison is an instructor in the School of Instructor Education at Vancouver Community College