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About the KnowledgeContext Corporation
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What does KnowledgeContext actually do? |
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We
teach young people to think about technology. One way we
accomplish that is by developing and distributing curriculum on understanding and evaluating technology for use by
teachers in their classrooms. This is different from the
vocational instruction on how to use specific technologies like email
and programming languages. Our conceptual approach is a complement
to that. Watch an interview with a parent.
The
curriculum activities are targeted at middle school, but the concepts
are applicable to those ages and higher. Becker College in
Massachusetts has adapted it to the undergraduate level. Teachers may download the
curriculum without cost.
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Why is that important? |
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Technology
has transformed our world The wheel, agriculture, the printing
press, the steam engine, electricity, and the Internet have had huge
impact on the lives we lead and the decisions we make.
Conclusion: important decisions are based on understanding and
evaluating technology.
Recently,
it has become clear that technological change is accelerating.
Computers are rendered obsolete in just a few years.
Conclusion: learning how to operate a specific technology (e.g. a
software program) will itself become obsolete unless complemented by
learning those patterns that endure over many generations of
technology. Our curriculum teaches those enduring patterns.
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Who is involved? |
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Teachers
and people who work in the technology industry have been our main
supporters. Our board of directors includes people from Oracle,
JPMorgan, and Riverside Publishing. Our curriculum advisor is a veteran
middle school teacher with 40 years experience. A 6th grade
teacher with 20 years experience has been using our curriculum for four
years. Our executive director came from AT&T and holds a
degree in electrical engineering and computer science. Teachers in
Berkeley, San Jose, and Santa Cruz , California, have helped us develop
and test our curriculum.
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What does this program cost? |
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There is
no charge for teachers using our curriculum in their classrooms.
We sell nothing to schools, so this is not a "loss leader"
product. All of our funding comes from corporations, foundations,
grants, and individual donors. We are a 501(c)(3) educational
non-profit corporation, so all donations are tax deductible.
If a
corporation wishes to incorporate our curriculum into their educational
outreach program, we request that they pay a licensing fee so that
teachers will never have to. If a school or district would like us
to provide a teacher workshop, we would like to work with them to secure
a grant funding this effort.
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How can I get
involved, too?
(Contact us on the
feedback page.) |
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Start with our How Can I Help
webpage.
Teachers
can review and download the curriculum on-line. The download includes lesson plans and student
handouts. Activity descriptions identify any materials
necessary/suggested for the activity.
Schools/districts/offices
of education can introduce teachers to our website and curriculum.
As our funding allows, we would be happy to give workshops to
teachers. Working with school groups to secure grants for this
professional development is one good way to do this.
Parents can ask their child's teacher if they are already covering the
understanding and evaluation of technology. If not, suggest they
visit our site or show them our
brochure or give
them a copy of our book.
Parents or
concerned citizens can introduce us to their employer's philanthropy
programs. Many corporations support charities that their employees
support (and, conversely, will not consider charities not sponsored by
an employee).
Anyone can
connect us with people or information to advance our effort to provide a
technological literacy to young people.
Innovation
is welcome: Perhaps you would like to teach our curriculum in your
child's classroom, or advocate the use of our curriculum. Just
contact us.
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Is
your question not here? |
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Give us
feedback!
We will answer your question directly and may add it to this list. |
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About the ICE-9 Curriculum
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Do you need to be computer literate to get involved? |
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No.
The curriculum uses technology as a cross-disciplinary thread, so
teachers with a background in science, history, social studies, or
English-language arts will be well-equipped to deliver it. The
curriculum is available for download from the KnowledgeContext website
(www.knowledgecontext.org). Print a
brochure that you
can share with teachers.
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My
child is not into technology but knows enough about computers to use
them. How will this curriculum help her? |
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The
curriculum shows how history, science, math, social studies,
communication, and almost all aspects of our lives are somehow
intertwined with technology. Whether or not she pursues a
technology career, your child will make decisions on issues affected by
technology. The curriculum will give her the foundation on which
to make technology-informed decisions about education, career, politics,
and more--rather than emotional decisions or those based on what someone
else asserts. It may also show how her areas of interest are
connected to and influenced by technology.
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Do I need computers in my classroom to deliver the curriculum? |
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No.
Most lessons do not require computers at all. Some offer optional
activities that use computers. One lesson (4. How Does It Work?) does rely
on Internet activities. For this lesson, access to a computer lab,
where student teams can share computers, is necessary. Internet
access is highly desirable for these computers, but can be worked
around by downloading our pages from a computer that is connected to the
Internet and copying these to this group of computers.
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Where does the KnowledgeContext content come from? |
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KnowledgeContext
structured the curriculum to be able to incorporate the best research
and publications on technology. Our executive director, with a
background in electrical engineering/computer science and teaching, has
built the curriculum on technology patterns from many sources and
written about them in a book. A
few books whose ideas have found their way into our curriculum:
Our
curriculum advisor incorporated learning cycles into each lesson and
into progression of lessons. Drawing on her background in
pedagogy, she incorporated activities for multiple intelligences as well
as layering for differentiated instruction.
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What schools use the KnowledgeContext program? |
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Westlake
School in Santa Cruz, California, has used our curriculum for years and
now Mission Hill Middle School in Santa Cruz does. Willard School in Berkeley and Bernal School in San Jose
were involved in the pilot program. Grant Joint Union High School
District in Sacramento, California, used our curriculum in an English
Language Development program. Portions of our content have
been incorporated into a program sponsored by the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). SETI's Voyages
through Time curriculum is in field test and will be disseminated to
many schools. Becker College in Massachusetts has adapted it to
the undergraduate level.
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How are students evaluated? |
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The first
and last lesson of the curriculum include an activity to write a paper
that explains and evaluates a technology. The essay on which
students base their writing is the same for the pre-test and
post-test. This demonstrates improvement in ability to understand
and evaluate technology.
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How does KnowledgeContext relate to the California Frameworks? |
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The
curriculum uses technology as a cross-disciplinary thread, connecting
history, social studies, science, math, and English-language arts.
See specific connections
between the curriculum and the California content standards.
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Does
the KnowledgeContext program replace something currently taught in
schools? |
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No.
Many people assume that technology education means training on how to
use specific technologies: web browsers, email clients, Java, HTML
editors, PowerPoint, Word, etc. This is already done in many
schools and is not what KnowledgeContext does.
Our
curriculum is more conceptual than vocational. By teaching the
patterns that endure through many generations of technology, it provides
a tool to understand and evaluate technology even when all of today's
computers and software are obsolete.
Those
enduring patterns show relationships and connections between technology
and core content areas (e.g. history and science). That creates a
context in which to make informed decisions about education, career,
civics, and personal issues that, by the nature of our modern
civilization, are influenced by technology.
The
curriculum can be taught in a core content area, a technology class (to
provide context before focusing on a specific technology), or in a
self-contained classroom (where it ties together the other subjects
taught).
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About the book Technology Challenged
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What is Technology Challenged about? |
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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, this book 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.
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Why is it important? |
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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?
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I already
understand technology. Why would I read it? |
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No single person understands all technology.
What rocket scientist repairs his own car, performs surgery on his own
family, develops genetically-modified crops, knows how to harvest them, and
invents new ways to synthesize music? Even before the 15th
century, when the printing press made it easier to research and develop
specialized knowledge, there was too much technology for any one person to
be able to build, repair, and operate it all.
And the situation is becoming more extreme.
New technology is being developed around the world and around the clock in
countless specialized areas. Being immortal would just give us more
time to fall farther behind.
But as hopeless as understanding all the details
is, many of us are quite capable of understanding the simple patterns behind
a wide variety of technologies. That enables us to evaluate those
technologies, deciding if they are good for us, our community, and our
environment. While the "technologically competent" may have
already figured out some of the patterns underlying "technological
literacy," their ability to create technology makes all the more
important their ability to evaluate it.
So you may already be technically adept, but
chances are good that Technology Challenged will offer you a bigger view of
the technology you know so well. And who doesn't like to see the
familiar in a new context?
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What do you mean by "simple
patterns behind a wide variety of technologies"? |
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Two examples...How does technology work?
It can be centralized or distributed, and over time it may swing from one
to the other. Most electric energy production is centralized in
large fossil fuel-burning plants, but also nuclear plants and
hydroelectric dams. The first power plants were distributed,
however, with small generators distributed in New York City and one
underneath the home of a very wealthy family ("the monster in the
basement"). That early pattern is returning with solar power on the
roofs of some homes. An entirely different technology, computers,
started as huge, centralized systems shared by everyone who used them, but
became distributed with the personal computer (PC) and even more so with
the Internet. But the Internet has created the centralized "server
farms," which fill huge rooms with the equivalent of PCs to "serve up" web
pages to all of those browsing from our distributed PCs.
Next example...What are technology's costs and
benefits? Independent of the specific technology, the more it
enables us, the more dependent we become on it. When our computer
crashes or there's a network outage or we're buried under an avalanche of
spam, many of us gain appreciation for how dependent we are on email.
Likewise, if we lose a cell phone. Blackouts clarify our dependence
on electricity. Labor strikes by garbage collectors reveal our
dependence on this infrastructure. The more useful a technology, the
greater our dependence, which does not mean we should not use it, but it
does recommend that create resilient systems with backup plans for the
times we lose technologies we can't imagine living without.
A few patterns
help to explain a diversity of technologies. The game's the same but
the tools change
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Who is it written for? |
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Technology Challenged is written for:
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A general adult audience interested in
better understanding our world
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Parents who want to put technology into
context for their children
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Teachers who want more context for using
KnowledgeContext's curriculum
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Students of education, history, and
technology
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Anyone who would like to understand the
technology underlying their choices in life
Two rather bright middle school students read the book and
interviewed the author,
showing that age is not a factor.
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If it's written for adults, how does that support "Teaching Young People
to Think About Technology"? |
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When presented with KnowledgeContext's curriculum on technology, many
teachers assume it's about how to use computers. Many parents also
jump to this conclusion, pointing out that their children learn about (how to
use) technology so quickly, they don't need extra help. The book is
a response to that, helping to show that the quicker we are at figuring
out how to use technology, the more important our being able to evaluate
it.
How reassured would you be if your young child developed a
precocious ability to light matches? Or if your neighbor's child had
this talent? Clearly, the critical thinking ability to know when
or if to light a match is important. While matches are a form
of technology, there are far more powerful forms, from nuclear weaponry to
genetically engineered viruses. Being able to understand and
evaluate these forms is even more important.
Teachers and parents are not the only adults we need to educate.
Sources of funding, whether private foundations or government or
individual donors, may not fully understand the importance of critical
thinking about technology. This book is for them, too, because their
contributions to KnowledgeContext are critical to delivering our
curriculum (and training the teachers who will).
The book is another reason to be on the media. Any newspaper or
magazine article, and any radio or TV spot will be, at it's core, about
how we each can understand enough about technology to make conscious,
critical, thoughtful choices for ourselves and for our society.
Even though the shortest distance between any two points is a straight
line, in a world full of walls the quickest distance may be around.
So, while the book may reach only the brightest of young people, the book helps
our curriculum reach all students by first educating adults.
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Why would someone read it? |
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Technology Challenged...
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Enhances technological literacy.
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Gives a simple strategy for understanding and
evaluating any technology
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Makes sense of rapid change by revealing the
underlying patterns in technology's history and future
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Connects to a middle school curriculum on
critical thinking, helping parents and teachers support the learning process
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Empowers readers to identify and choose
technology that is good for them, their community, and our civilization
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Supports the philanthropic activities of
KnowledgeContext, a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit corporation through a
portion of the profits from sale of this book.
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Tells many interesting stories.
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What's with the title? What does it mean? |
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"Technology Challenged" has at least two meanings. First, it refers
to many of us who feel overwhelmed by the rapid pace of technological
change. Just as those referred to by the politically-correct term
"vertically challenged" may have trouble reaching a basketball hoop, those
of us who are "technology challenged" may have trouble understanding and
evaluating the technology that impacts our lives. When one considers
how much technology is developed by specialists around the world and
around the clock, it quickly becomes apparent that no single person could
come close to understanding all technology. So we are all, more or
less, technology challenged. There's no shame in that. The
book offers us a response to this flood of change: an approach to
understanding and evaluating any technology by finding the patterns that
hold true for many or all technologies. It won't transform anyone
into a rocket scientist, but it will help even rocket scientists
understand the technology that lies outside their areas of expertise.
The second meaning of "Technology Challenged" refers to an action we can
take toward technology: challenging it. Instead of blindly accepting
or rejecting technology, we can evaluate it based on a contextual
(scientific, sociological, philosophical, etc.) understanding of it.
We can challenge technologies to determine if they truly benefit us, our
community, our civilization, or our environment. While Technology
Challenged is about understanding and evaluating technology, these are
means to the end of taking action in our lives so we can guide technology
in a beneficial direction.
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How did you come up with all these
stories? |
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Technology Challenged draws on research and observations from many
sources. The book's innovation is in organizing technology's
patterns into ICE-9, an easy-to-use strategy for understanding and
evaluating any technology. A few stories are original to the author,
but the section Going Beyond This Book gives references to many
books, articles, and websites where the other stories originate. The
reader may find stories from the newspaper or radio suddenly answering one
of the ICE-9 questions that frame the book. Context is crucial to
understanding anything and ICE-9 gives context.
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