Leges artificii

I have picked a piece from the NY Times Sunday Magazine Education Issue I cited last post, the article Achieving Techno-Literacy by Kevin Kelly. He discusses his experience home-schooling his son for a year, the role technology played, and the kinds of techno-literacy lessons he wanted to incorporate. Here's his list of some key ideas:

• Every new technology will bite back. The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused. Look for its costs.

Sometimes it's not just a problem of people not looking for the costs, it's that people accept them easily. Take cars for example. This technology contributes to 40,000 deaths every year in the US alone. That's almost like having a Vietnam war every year. I think about this a lot, but I still drive. Do you? Looking for costs is important, but it may not be enough.

• Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything you need until the last second. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete.

I feel like this could be taught in a home economics course as well as a technology course. And could be taught to school administration. We have to think long term when we buy into new technologies, for ourselves or our schools.

• Before you can master a device, program or invention, it will be superseded; you will always be a beginner. Get good at it.

This might be my favorite one. "You will always be a beginner" is great advice for our age. Technology changes fast. Economies change fast. Even our climate is changing fast. Expert beginners are going to succeed no matter what the future has in store.

• Be suspicious of any technology that requires walls. If you can fix it, modify it or hack it yourself, that is a good sign.

A skill I sorely lack. Maybe it's just me, but it seems that its only my friends who profess computer geekdom who can modify the software and/or hardware that corporations put out for us. Perhaps I'm alone, but I feel any technological instruction I received failed to include a creative element. I learned to use the system, not create my own, or even understand the mechanics behind the system.

• The proper response to a stupid technology is to make a better one, just as the proper response to a stupid idea is not to outlaw it but to replace it with a better idea.

I wonder if this is like evolution. People think that natural selection somehow perfects living things. It doesn't. It creates organisms that are adapted enough to survive and reproduce. Improvement slows drastically after it reaches a bare minimum (except for the random chance of mutation). The same might be true with technology and ideas. Stupid technologies may persist if they're good enough to get by on. It could be very difficult for better technologies to succeed if people have adapted to the stupid ones. We should also look at the first rule to make sure that the costs of stupid technologies aren't costing us too much while we work on new technologies.

• Every technology is biased by its embedded defaults: what does it assume?

Yes! All technologies make assumptions about what we need, what we like, what's best for everyone. We are constantly taking them for granted. This is partly because our thinking is so flexible. We can adjust to their assumptions without realizing it. Keep alert and be critical!

• Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for. The crucial question is, what happens when everyone has one?

I bet our technology and social studies teachers could help us out here. Applications and effects of new inventions have often had unintended results. What examples from history could demonstrate this to our students?

• The older the technology, the more likely it will continue to be useful.

A close second for favorite tech-literacy lesson. I think we sometimes fail to respect the filter of time. The tried and true are just as relevant, or even more so, than the latest trend. But maybe that's just the classicist talking.

• Find the minimum amount of technology that will maximize your options.

Another lesson in frugality. Administrators (and any consumer) should plan ahead and think how to get the most bang for the buck.
And the more streamlined our technological resources are, the fewer unavoidable side effects we have to deal with: the fewer things to break, the fewer things to become obsolete, etc.

I found these literacy lessons relevant and interesting . They were broad enough to be applicable to all sorts of technologies and webtools, and they also required critical thinking skills.