The return of the one some perspectives on the analog and the digital and their uses and abuses in education

Abstract

The paper addresses theoretical and epistemological issues related to what has been termed 'digital turn' with an eye on the shift from the analog to the digital communication and the postulated division into two realities (actual and virtual). This division is approached in the text from the perspective of its broad consequences for education not only as regards the use of digital media in teaching and learning, but also as a new possibility of revising the relationship between man and technology and as a potentially effective means of rethinking the binary/dual cognitive ordering of various categorizations of the real, which ordering, especially as regards higher levels of education, need not be taken for granted. Bringing in the post-philosophical ideas of, among others, Francois Laruelle, the paper considers the coming of the dual to visibility through digitization as a possibility of critical bringing alternative ways of thinking to the educational agenda as a possible effect of the digitalization of the social/cultural milieu by way of what may be called a return of the One which encompasses all kinds of pluralities, and not only the ones decisionally enabled by binary oppositions. The digital turn, as I claim in the paper, may also be thought of in terms of an educational turn in which technology is not only used as tool, but which may also be constitutive of students' less externally oriented self-consciousness.