Foundations of learning, Design, and Technology

This Google Site will serve as the course home page for all sections of EDU 590, "Foundations of Learning, Design, and Technology." 

As a reminder, please submit all course assignments to your individual sections in Blackboard. 

For the Spring Section of EDU 590 (May 1 - June 23, 2023), the course instructor is:

• EPN 22430494  with Dr. Jennifer Parker <parke2jl@cmich.edu> 

Assignment Instructions 

Assignment instruction can be found through the navigation menus above, and through these links:

• Learning Pathways (525 points total)

• Anchor Assignments (475 points total)

EDU 590 Weekly Updates

• We will have scheduled Zoom sessions, watch your email!

Educational technology, according to Australian researcher and theorist Neil Selwyn, “needs to be understood as a profoundly political affair – a site of constant conflict and struggle between different interests and groups” (viii). In his book, Distrusting Educational Technology (2013), he describes many of the common ways in which educators use technology, outlining the many corporate and bureaucratic interests that drive their choices, often invisibly. 

He goes on to argue that “the educational use of digital technology has no one ‘true’ meaning or inherent ‘potential’ that some people are more able to see than others. Instead, the educational use of digital technology needs to be seen as an ideologically driven concern” (viii).

It is with this critical perspective that we begin our exploration of educational technology. You are well aware of the many ways in which technology can be used to distribute assignments, collect performance data on students, and, sometimes, even invite students into their own creative expression. 

Our goal this semester will be to ask about those common practices – as well as to imagine new possibilities – thinking about when, how, and why we might use technology in our own classrooms, while also interrogating, as Selwyn notes, the “ideologically driven concern[s]” that often go unexamined.