Abstract:

The rapid development of artificial intelligence over the last few years, particularly related to large language models, has again focused attention on the relationship between humanity and technology. On the one hand, advances in artificial intelligence offer a range of opportunities and challenges associated with what might be described as the mechanics of education, such as designing student support for increasing numbers of students in higher education (Popenici & Kerr, 2017). On the other hand, advances in artificial intelligence raise the spectre of ‘The Black Box Society’ (Pasquale, 2015) - one in which technological power is concentrated in the hands of the few - and one in which the operation of powerful algorithms is intentionally obscured. As Popenici and Kerr (2017) indicate, the latter view runs counter to the democratising and critical discourse that characterises higher education.

Though democratising and critical discourse is associated with higher education, as Köseoğlu et al. ( 2023, p.6) point out, educational technology programmes do not address the ethics of the relationship between humans and technology - either in “academic training or in professional practice” - despite the fact that the emerging field of critical digital pedagogy has illuminated ways in which this relationship might be critiqued (Stommel, 2014; Selwyn et al., 2020; Köseoğlu et al., 2023). This paper proposes a broad theoretical approach that may be used to encourage an ethical perspective on the relationship between humans and technology in a higher education environment. Since educational technology is an interdisciplinary endeavour, it is necessary to provide a theoretical framework that accounts for the ethical nature of pedagogy itself as well as the ethical nature of educational technology. For this reason, the proposed approach is informed by concepts drawn from: critical pedagogy; Bernstein’s (2000) sociological theory of pedagogy; and critical digital pedagogy.

Keywords:

Education, technology, ethics, critcal, pedagogy.