Technology: Enabling or Constraining?

With all of its power of potential, technology also seems to be a little intimidating because it requires us to face our own limitations. It enables us to do much work more efficiently, opens up new ways of analyzing problems, and challenges us to stretch our creative skills. However, it also forces us to recognize how much we have not mastered - and how much there is to learn. I often feel constrained by technology, as I am overwhelmed by the tools in contains that I should learn. But Eldred and Toner offer a perspective that helps me to see technology less as a tool and more as an aspect of my worldview. They emphasize the importance of teaching students how to change margins on a paper, how to add page numbers, how to set up a bibliography, etc. But more importantly, they believe in teaching students to examine the role of technology in their own lives - its relation to power and economics, who benefits and who is harmed by it, how it drives their ways of thinking. I find my own perspective on technology has been greatly altered by their comments, and this metadiscourse has given me a new approach to technology to wrestle with and to bring to my students.

Writing, Teaching Computing? What are we doing?