Educational Technology

Many of us learned about dominant and recessive genes in a humdrum high school biology class. Some of us may still recognize the terms and symbols twenty or thirty years later—are your eyes bb or Bb? But, as it turns out, a very small number of traits in humans and other animals, plants, amoeba … you name it … involve the dominance mechanism of a single gene with just two alleles. (An allele is a variation of a gene, like the B or b in the above example.) The more biologists discover about the mechanisms of inheritance, the fewer traits we can point to that involve only one gene or can be illustrated using a simple Punnett square. In fact, biologists are compiling information about our genes at an astounding rate. As the process of sequencing DNA improves, the science of biology is dramatically changing.

This chapter concludes The role of criticism in understanding problem solving. In it, the overall message of the book—that criticism and critical theories can serve to aid critical reading and synthesis of the educational technology research literature—is summarized. One of the strengths of the educational technology field is its interdisciplinarity. As students enter the field from many different academic disciplines, they should be encouraged to apply not just the content of their former disciplines but also the strategies of and frameworks for thinking about problems.

The concept of criticism as a tool for research, although well established in other educational research traditions, is not well established in the domain of Educational Technology. This book changes all that by substantiating criticism as a way to step back and critically evaluate an educational intervention within educational technology. Doing so provides an valuable approach for researchers in terms of guiding meta analyses and theoretical studies, preventing the proverbial "spinning of the wheels" that often happens in educational research.