Technology Challenged: Understanding Our Creations & Choosing Our Future [Paperback]

Miguel F. Aznar (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2005

Technology has transformed our world from the first stone tools through development of agriculture, writing, printing, global transportation, global communication, computing, genetic engineering, and much more. When we used the same technology as our parents and their parents, we needed no more than to know how to operate a few objects. Today, technology's generations pass more quickly than human generations. Further, our choices in education, career, politics, and health are predicated on rapidly changing technology. How do we understand enough about our creations that we can make informed choices? How can we choose our individual and collective future? Stories from the Hawaiian Bobtail squid's use of bacteria to simulate moonlight to an Australian aboriginal tribe's mythology-based evaluation of axes and canoes illustrate a nine-step strategy for understanding and evaluating any technology. By painting a big picture view of technology, Technology Challenged offers context, an antidote to information overload. From that perspective, it reveals the simple patterns underlying all technology, allowing us to see what does not change in a technological world of rapid change.

Editorial Reviews

Review

With the power to feed the world or to destroy it, technology is worth thinking about. --Cathy Barlow, Dean, Watson School of Education, University of North Carolina at Wilmington

Only a lifelong learner can be a good captain in our technological world, and this scintillating, optimistic book will help. --John Smart, President, Acceleration Studies Foundation

Anyone concerned about the life and death relationship between our planet's future and technology, should read Technology Challenged. --Jim Puckett, Coordinator, Basel Action Network

About the Author

Miguel F. Aznar is Executive Director of KnowledgeContext. He is passionate about teaching how to understand and evaluate technology. Mr. Aznar discovered this calling after studying electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley and working as a software engineer (NASA, Amdahl) and management consultant (Ernst & Young, AT&T). He speaks publicly on this issue of technological literacy at conferences and on the media.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: KnowledgeContext (June 1, 2005)
• ISBN-10: 0976385805
• ISBN-13: 978-0976385806
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,840,051 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I have long been fascinated by how we understand and evaluate technology. The patterns underlying our tools became clear over years, starting even before I studied electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley and continuing through the 1998 founding of KnowledgeContext, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation that helps young people think critically about technology. KnowledgeContext has attracted a diverse team of teachers, technologists, and businesspeople to develop curriculum on understanding and evaluating technology. Through its website, KnowledgeContext has provided that curriculum to well over a thousand teachers and now also offers it in wiki form, enabling open collaboration on new versions of the curriculum.

The curriculum is based on a simple strategy for understanding and evaluating technology. In 2004, I brought that strategy to COSMOS, a summer program for mathematics and science at the University of California at Santa Cruz. There may be no better argument for the importance of understanding and evaluating our tools than the power of nanotechnology. While we may be content with simply knowing how to operate many of our technologies, the extraordinary costs and benefits--both existing and promised--of nanotechnology make clear that the future of civilization depends on collaborative, context-aware, critical thinking. With this realization, in 2005 I focused the strategy on nanotechnology, using it to structure an intensive course for precocious high school students in the COSMOS program, which I have been teaching and refining since.

Coincident with creating my nanotechnology course in 2005, I joined Foresight Institute as director of education. The Foresight Institute is the leading think tank and public interest institute on nanotechnology. Founded in 1986, Foresight was the first organization to educate society about the benefits and risks of nanotechnology. For a teacher of nanotechnological literacy, Foresight was an obvious fit.

The concept of technological literacy, as opposed to technological competency, is new to many teachers. It may be that the rapid technological change we are experiencing encourages a myopic view, narrowed to how we operate computers. But that means missing the big picture of understanding and evaluating any technology, from stone tools and printing press to biotechnology and nanotechnology. Repeat encounters with teachers who were confused by the distinction between literacy and competency encouraged me to write a book. Although on a subject I had been living and breathing, it took years of research to uncover the patterns that transcend specific technologies and allow non-experts to comfortably operate at a level of abstraction. In 2005, I published Technology Challenged, a book that draws from around the world and from the beginning of civilization to reveal patterns in our tools and to offer a simple strategy for anyone to understand and evaluate any technology. Although intended to entertain with stories from Hawaiian bobtail squid to Australian aborigines, the book has also been adopted as a text by several colleges.

I serve as executive director of KnowledgeContext and on the advisory boards of both the Nanoethics Group and the Acceleration Studies Foundation. I have presented at educational conferences, including Computer Using Educators (CUE), California Educational Research Association (CERA), and California League of Middle Schools (CLMS). I have keynoted educational conferences, including Consortium for Research on Educational Accountability and Teacher Evaluation (CREATE), Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers for Technology (PT3), and California Middle Grades Partnership Network (CMGPN). Google invited me to present a Tech Talk on technological literacy.

Prior to entering education, I was in management consulting (Ernst & Young, AT&T) and software engineering (Amdahl, Open Systems Development). I was Phi Beta Kappa at UC Berkeley and presided over the Tau Beta Pi engineering honors society while studying there.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Tool, June 2, 2005

By 

P. Meyer (Cupertino, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Technology Challenged: Understanding Our Creations & Choosing Our Future (Paperback)

If you want thoughtful discussions of technology, you already know that such books are rare. Many books are rabidly in favor of new technology, a few draconian in rejection, most treat the subject with religious fervor. Aznar has delivered a book that helps us develop our own understanding, not just more faith. If you want to think for yourself, "Technology Challenged" is a book you'll value.

My favorite chapter in the book is Chapter 9: "How Do We Evaluate Technology?" But before then, Aznar discusses why we should care, why we should apply considered judgment to technology. He quickly gives us examples where technology delivers us both good and bad. He notes: "Unfortunately, the most compelling argument for a considered, critical approach would be a spectacular disaster . . . and that could exterminate us." The argument for critical analysis continues to Chapter 9, when he adds two reasons why evaluation is important. Neither is obvious, both are worth consideration.

The first reason? To communicate with others, and be understood. Simply to say "I like this technology" is not terribly useful. To say "here is something new we can do with this technology" can start some real communication. We need more of that around technology.

The second reason is to understand our own experience and values. His example: China choosing to value walls over ships in the 15th Century. What drives such a choice? Experience (the military risk had been hordes invading overland) and values (Confucian thinking stressed isolation over intercontinental exploration or trade.)

Ultimately, technology is about such choices. What we choose will change, but what we learn from our choices will be the enduring value. Technology Challenged can help guide that learning. The title of the book is a pun. The work inside is a gem.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The missing link between what technology is and what it does, June 2, 2005

By 

Mark Cathcart - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Technology Challenged: Understanding Our Creations & Choosing Our Future (Paperback)

This is a great book to help you relate to technology, to understand its cyclic and reusable nature, and to understand the principles that guide it.

Aznar writes in a clear, simple to understand style and uses this to describe the ICE-9 approach to evaluating technology. He makes a big deal out of the nine essential questions on Identity, Change, and Evaluation that go to make up ICE-9 and shows how it can be applied to any technology varying from legostorm which we'd recognise as a technology, to soccer which I didn't.

Today we live in a sea of readily available books, especially in my business, information technology. Mostly, they simply tell you what to do. They very rarely help you understand the technology. Rather, they just say what it is and how to operate it and leave you to make the big jump to understanding it. This approach doesn't work longer term, increasingly as technology gets more complex in its drive for simplicity, we risk losing the skills to understand it.

Aznar asserts, and I agree, that critical thinking on costs and benefits becomes more important as technologies become more powerful and have greater societal impact. This book and the ICE-9 approach will help you apply that critical thinking.

Aznars' knowledgecontext has a pretty good web site that will give you a lightweight intro and the book fills in all the rest! http://knowledgecontext.org/

5.0 out of 5 stars Technology challenged, March 13, 2006

By 

Sherri Bates (Long Beach, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Technology Challenged: Understanding Our Creations & Choosing Our Future (Paperback)

This self-proclaimed technologically challenged individual, who is guilty of previously evaluating technology soley for it's immediate effect, found Mr. Aznar's book to be not only very useful, but intensely thought-provoking. Evaluating technology in terms of his nine basic questions, makes it more manageable and less intimidating. My 80 year old mother in law was delighted to discuss this book in regards to evaluating the technological changes that have occured during her lifetime. My 9 year old daughter recently used Mr. Aznar's nine basic questiong to spring board her science fair project.