{"id":136,"date":"2007-07-29T14:11:09","date_gmt":"2007-07-29T14:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ivyrun.com\/wordpress\/?p=136"},"modified":"2007-07-29T14:11:09","modified_gmt":"2007-07-29T14:11:09","slug":"technology-matters-technological-determinism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/?p=136","title":{"rendered":"Technology Matters: Technological Determinism"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Contextual Note:\u00a0 I will be taking an educational technology research seminar this fall.\u00a0 The text is Technology Matters: Questions to Live With<\/a> by Davide E. Nye.\u00a0 Since the topics are of general interest, I thought I would aid my own learning by blogging about each chapter.\u00a0 The question which has been posed to us by the professor is “How do Nye’s responses apply to K-12 teaching and learning?”<\/p>\n

The first chapter asks the question: Can We Define Technology? \u00a0 His first definition revolves around evolution and concludes that only intelligent apes and human beings MAKE tools. \u00a0 He goes on to suggest that technology is more important in terms of social rather than technical evolution, since, unlike animals, humans are not simply content to live but are always looking for change and growth.\u00a0 His answer to the which came first–necessity or invention–is, in many cases, invention.\u00a0 Nye writes,<\/p>\n

“Necessity is often not the\u00a0 mother of invention.\u00a0 In many cases, it surely has been just the opposite, and invention has been the mother of necessity.\u00a0 When humans possess a tool, they excel at finding new uses for it.\u00a0 The tool often exists before the problem to be solved.\u00a0 Latent in every tool are unforeseen transformations” (p. 2).\u00a0 It occurred to me that, while this may be true for the larger culture where it seems that new tools are, indeed, changing the way we work, live, learn, and play.\u00a0 In schools, however, we have Larry Cuban’s report of what normally happen to technologies: they are absorbed in the culture of the school.\u00a0 Education changes them rather than the other way around.\u00a0 Indeed, I heard that message just this week from several technology and curriculum directors from several different school divisions.\u00a0 The Internet, certainly THE disruptive technology of the past decade, is being tamed, or in some cases, bypassed completely through the use of INTRAnet resources. \u00a0 The vagaries of the web and access to broad-enough bandwidth are making schools more interested in gaining some control.\u00a0 For instance, they subscribe to a video streaming service but the videos are loaded on their own server to facilitate use. \u00a0 And, the problems of kids stumbling on porn or predators online have made them more eager to subscribe to closed networks that provide drill and practice or integrated learning systems that can be more easily used by teachers.\u00a0 No worry over how to both use weblogs or wikis and how to keep students safe…stand-alone software and secure networks have paired together to create a technology teachers already understand: worksheets and guided practice.\u00a0 The software probably includes data collection as well, something that has become a hot topic in recent years as educators try to figure out how to improve standardized test scores.\u00a0 In this case, it is assessment that is driving both invention and necessity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Contextual Note:\u00a0 I will be taking an educational technology research seminar this fall.\u00a0 The text is Technology Matters: Questions to Live With by Davide E. Nye.\u00a0 Since the topics are of general interest, I thought I would aid my own learning by blogging about each chapter.\u00a0 The question which has been posed to us … Continue reading Technology Matters: Technological Determinism<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4X3L0-2c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}