You hear it all the time at education seminars, conferences and keynotes: “It’s not about the technology, it’s about the people.” Well, excuse me, but what a platitude — and how easy to get eduweb sceptics and the generally afeared on side when you tell them what they want to hear! Having said that, however, I am being a bit provocative in my title for this post …
Of course it’s about the people, but what’s often missing from the trite, unreflective maxim referred to above is the fact that people are technology, technology is people. We cannot be homo sapiens without technology.
Our mistake is to think of technology as only shiny, whizzy things that go bang. After all, a pencil is a technology. Writing itself is a technology. Indeed, a rock can be a technology, depending on the use to which it is put (I’m thinking ‘stone axe,’ here).
But to let the ‘It’s All About the People’ people off the hook, let’s acknowledge that they’re onto something, because what they’re pointing to is the need to focus more on the people than on the technology itself, if only because people are rather more inscrutable and intractable and difficult to handle than is the technology. This might seem counter-intuitive to some, but, when you think about it, it’s easier to figure out how to change the display order of a wiki page than it is to change the way a person thinks about, understands, and engages with their own relationship to technology. So, let’s work with the people, and acknowledge their apprehensions and help them make sense of how the technology works, but let’s also not lose sight of one of the things that makes us human to begin with.
Tags: Digital literacy, Opinion, Technology
September 24, 2008 at 12:44 pm |
Provocative opinion, as always — but spot on.
October 1, 2008 at 1:45 pm |
It would seem that John Dewey would agree with me. He’s unable to post a comment for himself, so I’ll have to do it for him:
“[t]he uses to which [appliances] are put are civilization, and without the things the uses would be impossible” (Democracy and Education, III, 4). yeah.