ABSTRACT
I think John Weaver raises some very important questions about technology and education that need to become a part of the “complicated conversation” in curriculum studies, and in pedagogical practice. His essay helps reframe the conversation on technology by reconceptualizing the very idea of technology. In the commonsense world of educational practice in most public schools and classrooms, teachers think of technology as all that stuff related to computers—entering data on student achievement into computer programs, using computers to “drill” students on test-preparation skills and knowledge content, and perhaps more recently, in more affluent schools, using computer technology to link their computers to an overhead screen and to students’ laptop computers, all linked to the Internet. This is the “new” technology in public education, although as Weaver suggests, it has some very “old” roots in Western culture. The point here is that technology is not just something teachers pick up because it is lying around. Rather, it incorporates a way of “thinking” about curriculum, pedagogy, and the educational process that needs to be unpacked rather than uncritically taken for granted. We must proceed, as Heidegger did, by questioning technology, and rethinking technology as technē, a way of bringing something into presence, of producing something according to one worldview or another, one way of “being in the world” or another.
