Continuing the conversation...

I thought my Sunday blog was my last, but here I am again. I suppose I’ll continue blogging about society, culture, and technology for a little while more. I feel I’ve reached another level of awareness, and through this medium I can comment on it.

What made me come back today was a Trinidadian student I met today. I immediately remembered the article we read about the ‘Internet and relationships’ and could not resist myself. I had to ask her if she used the Internet to communicate with her family members and expected to confirm Miller and Slater’s research. But somehow to my surprise, she only uses the phone to call home. What a disappointment!

[Check the Thursday, November 13, 2003 entrance down below, or click here to jump to it.]

On beauty, truth, love, and integrity

Pretzer analyzes what he calls the “five basic categories of rationales for studying technology” in K-12 schools today. Through this analysis the author looks at personal and national utilitarianism, national security, technologically literates, and applied problem solving. He presents a different perspective emphasizing the need for the development of (1) “leadership, communication skills; quantification skills, interpersonal relations, and the ability to work in teams; … the capacity to adapt to rapid change” (p. 3), (2) citizenry, (3) cooperation and collaboration, (4) goal, values and principles, and (5) human progress.

Learning about and with technology cannot have as its main goal the use of technology. Technology is more than anything else a tool, an instrument, a gizmo, a gadget, an artifact that should help us accomplish a task, solve a problem, share ideas, develop a product, collaborate with others, and work together from afar.

I agree with Pretzer when he states: “Learning technology is essential precisely because it situates learners as participants in the process, provides them with real contexts for their actions, and requires them to reflect about the process” (p. 11). Note that this means that technology is used for a lot more than drill and practice, that it is used to develop critical thinking skills.

Pretzer understands that through technology students should not only learn cognitive skills, but also affective skills, and that history should always remind us where we have been. Learning from the past can only help us improve the future. As always, the ultimate goal of education should be the development of values and ethics.


Reference:

Pretzer, W.S. (1997). Technology education and the search for truth, beauty, and love. Journal of Technology Education, 8(2). Retrieved on May 13, 2002 from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournal/JTE/v8n2/pretzer.jte-v8n2.html.

Hacking away ...

Hackers and crackers … the good and the evil!

Hackers are not always seen as malicious people, take for example the on-line technical dictionary whatis.com, they look at it from a very different perspective. Hackers are presented as “clever programmer[s]”, people who fit one of five different characteristics, which all of us would probably fit in. There is a difference between a hacker and a cracker they say, it is the cracker who enjoys ‘cracking’ (this is, breacking into) other people's or organization’s computers. But the media has made a big mess out of this and usually portrays crackers as hackers. Ross, the author of this chapter, does so too.

I believe Ross tries to establish a fine line between the good and the evil 'hackers' (this is crackers) can do. He argues that hackers “directly or indirectly, … legitimate needs of industrial R&D” (p. 337). In this particular case, 'hackers' push for more research in the security area as they venture in different computer systems and leave their mark.

In the last section of this chapter, Ross also explores the impact of technology on culture: the use of technology for surveillance, the amount of personal information available on the Internet about each of us, the necessary ‘technoskepticism’ for social change. The idea that no product is good enough, making people wait for a new product to substitute the old one, encouraging people to continue buying new technology, even though they probably don’t need it.

Somehow this chapter was discouraging to me. To say out loud, to glorify 'hacking' because of the need for new research and development; and to acknowledge the impact of new developments and artificially created needs in a consumerist society, seems to lead to nowhere instead of to a brighter future.

References:

Ross, A. (1991). Hacking away at the counterculture. In C. Penley & A. Ross (Eds.), Technoculture (107-134). Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. [Chapter 10].

Whatis.com. (2003). Retrieved on Sunday, November 30, 2003 from http://whatis.techtarget.com/.