conceptualisation of teachers’everyday professional practice, where microinnova-
tion is a defining characteristic. Focusing on the development of a web-based
authoring system for use in teaching and learning at one university, Bigum ( 2000 )
drew on the theoretical resources of actor–network theory to trace the ways that
human and nonhuman actors are translated via a series of mutual negotiations as
they make alliances with other actors. Bigum ( 2000 , p. 20) argues that, although
their promise of abstraction and generalisation make causal models of innovation
attractive, they are of little practical value when innovations are necessarily“messy,
always involve compromise and translation and are fundamentally political”.
50.5 Considering Teacher Education
I have provided a critique of technicist conceptions of teacher technology practice,
and argued in support of sociomaterial views where practices cannot be contained
within a set of predetermined skills or recipes for producing particular effects or
outcomes. So what are the implications of sociomaterial conceptions of teacher
technology practice for teacher education? Within a sociomaterial ontological
framing, it might seem contradictory to offer a‘roadmap’for teacher education, so I
offer instead some principles for consideration, principles that I see as having
potential to support generative practices within teacher education. A technicist
approach to teacher education would prescribe a set of skills to be transferred to
preservice teachers—those skills seen as the currency of the contemporary ICT
tools and processes. Explicit teaching of particular skills has long been recognised
as inadequate within an ICT context: even within computing degrees, university
educators have long sought to develop undergraduates’understandings of key
principles rather than specific skills that in the context of rapid technological change
will soon become redundant. Understandings of how ICT skills are commonly
learnt have also changed—no longer do teachers step students through operations
necessary to make a particular device or piece of software work, and no longer are
instructional manuals seen as a useful resource. We develop skills in the use of
these toolsby using them, and it is through this usage that the characters of tools are
co-produced (Lynch 2006 ). This understanding about the development of ICT skills
is recognised in much of the educational technology literature that focuses instead
ontechnology integration, in that it emphasises that preservice teachers’operational
skills ought to be developed in the context of curriculum-based teaching and
learning. This can be seen when ICT skills are incorporated into curriculum
methods courses so technology use with respect to particular areas of school cur-
riculum and particular pedagogical approaches can be modelled and learnt.
However, from a sociomaterial view, concepts liketechnology integrationand the
goals and assumptions of pedagogies seeking to model particular usages are equally
flawed. These approaches seek to reproduce curriculum and curriculum-associated
teaching methods, where technological innovation is seen as a diffusion of ways
and means of doing the same, but better and quicker. Not surprisingly, these
748 J. Lynch