Abstract
In this paper, I aim to achieve two complementary objectives. Firstly, to show the constitutive constraints to the theoretical and empirical studies which analyze the causal links between technology and education. I seek to evidence that such endeavor lacks a happy ending due to its own endogenous limitations. Secondly, I aim to evidence that, beyond these causal links, there is an inevitable issue in the micro-educational dimension: the physical co-presence of professors and students to generate successful rituals with high emotional energy. To this end, I use the interaction ritual chains by Randall Collins and the model of teacher self-efficacy by Pajares and Bandura. Thus, I stress that, besides transmitting information and content (which requires professors with active roles in research), the role of university professors is to be catalysts and generators of emotional energy in the classroom, which also requires their physical co-presence. I conclude that, depending on the objectives of the students when choosing their studies, these could be fully virtualized when students seek only content acquisition, or professors’ physical co-presence should be maintained when students’ goals go beyond purely informational acquisition and seek interactional rituals which transmit emotions and energy that contribute to the importance of intellectual content.
Keywords
Teacher self-efficacy; Emotional energy; Technology and education; Education micro-rituals; University education