that are distinct in the assumptions they make about the nature of reality, and in
their purpose and the type of value they seek to produce. One tradition is focused on
developing and auditing technical solutions to educational problems. Biesta terms
this tradition the technological view of education. He does this without any
intention to allude to educational technology, but instead to put to work a Classical
machine metaphor to convey the ontology upon which such purposes are based.
From Biesta’s technological view, education is seen“as a machinery where there
are inputs, mediating variables and outcomes”(p. 16). Accordingly, from this view
of education, research ought to focus on determining which and in what manner
inputs and variables can be manipulated to produce particular outcomes. In relation
to technology usage, I have previously termed this aninput–outputapproach
(Lynch 2006 , p. 32), where there is an assumption that a technological artefact“can
be inserted into an educational setting to create a particular effect.”Similarly,
Bigum ( 2000 ) discussed what he termed category-based approaches to investigating
educational innovation, where inquiry seeks to develop predictive models. Such
approaches are attractive because they appear to be‘scientific’, to allow for gen-
eralisation and replication, and to be fundable and assessable in straightforward
ways.
In contrast, Biesta’s second tradition is based on an understanding of education
as“open, semiotic and recursive”(Biesta 2015 , p. 16), consistent with ontologies of
immanence that preclude the pre-programming of results. This research tradition
focuses on developing understandings of the complexity of educational practice.
Biesta—perhaps unhelpfully for our purposes—terms this second tradition anon-
technological view of education. It is worth taking a moment to consider this
metaphor in relation to the focus of this chapter to see how else a machine metaphor
might be conceived and utilised. As argued in Lynch ( 2006 ), an input–output
approach is just one way of conceiving of a technological artefact, and I want to
argue here that machines and their usage look different when we start from an
ontological basis that recognises the indeterminacy of technology and its emergence
through practice. In a move to reclaim a more nuanced and generative under-
standing of the termtechnology, I will proceed here to employ Biesta’s distinction,
but to refer to thefirst of these views as consistent with attechnicist view of
educational technologyand the second as consistent with asociomaterial view of
educational technology, where the latter recognises that technological artefacts
emerge through practice and in relation with other entities.
The distinction between technicist and sociomaterial views is useful when
characterising different conceptions of teaching. A focus on developing solutions is
aligned with a technicist view of teaching, where teaching practice and the effects it
produces are conceived in linear ways, where particular outcomes can be pro-
grammed into the system, and where risks can be contained. This view of teaching
aligns with a view of teacher professionalism as entailing a suite of
profession-specific competencies (Connell 2009 ). Thus, technicist views of edu-
cation provide for the positing of context-specific capabilities, strategies and
744 J. Lynch