Please look back in anger

This has proven to be a good way to describe my combination of frustrations and lack of of effort. Writing about learning and new media, kind of a research field tagged with ‘ICT,’ ‘media literacy,’ ‘identity and learning,’ and so on, is not as easy as I thought. Or to be precise: Writing in that field seems sometimes to be exeptionally easy, but actually contributing to our understanding of education in light of new media is not. The coma node still needs a respirator.

If educational research within this field is to be taken seriously, one must look back more often and evalute theories and assumptions! We must be able to reflect upon what has been written and what has been said, and acknowledge problems and flauds in our views. If we trick ourselves to believe that new words separate us from what happened five years ago, and try to dress ourselves up as surfers on the waves of paradigmatic changes, we are just dull cowards running from the battlefield. There are no paradigm shifts. It’s mostly reproduction of bullshit in search for funding.

But, maybe looking back and accepting the fact that much of what has been done have served to produce and strenghten an ideology of anti-knowledge attitudes and crazy futuristic ideas within educational research, will lead to something? Maybe instead of running away we must stop and discuss what is going on, and what sort of fundamental problems the mixture of futurism, qualitative research methods and normative assumptions leads to?This is of course also a big fat ‘should,’ but at least I’m saying it, and at least I can back it up with something stronger than complex terms and models, and nonsense about creativity and border-crossing.

The next fad seems to be inter-cultural learning (maybe multi-cultural, I don’t know). People will be lured into master degrees in this qasisubject! Money will be thrown at the the well positioned bullshitters who write the most overcomplicated project descriptions. Nothing will be gained outside the «field» and in 10 years time something new will come along and everybody can erase and rewind once more. No, I rather think it’s time to look back in anger!