Technology Education Essay – August 2002 – Part 1
With the rapidly growing application of computing systems to all facets of everyday life, there is an increasing need for people who are well educated in technology and design principles to create and operate these systems. With the popularity of computers in particular, it is almost a requirement that a person should have some basic computer skills just to successfully navigate every day life. Lewis (1999) discusses the fact that “All high school graduates ought to be technologically literate, meaning that they can understand the nature of technology, appropriately use technological devices and processes, and participate in society’s decisions on technological issues"
Education as a whole is changing to accommodate these new fields and as with anything new, many issues and problems arise.
In this essay we will discuss some of the issues associated with design and technology education at a secondary level, and examine some of the ways in which these problems might be addressed.
The terms ‘Technology’ and ‘Design’ both have a fairly broad range of meanings so it will be helpful to define the context in which these words are used in this essay. For our purposes a technology is a system or a product which is used as a tool to produce a result, which could be a physical manufactured product, a piece of information, or a more broad-ranging effect that is intended to enhance or improve something in some way. Design is the creative process of planning the use of this technology to accomplish the best possible result.
As a useful example of a new field of technology we will focus chiefly on computers in terms of hardware and software, since this is an aspect of technology education which is rapidly growing in schools today. Also, when ‘technology education’ is mentioned it is intended to cover both design and technology education since design is usually counted as a technology subject at secondary school level.
There are more issues in technology education than this essay has scope to cover but some of the most important ones will be discussed. In particular we will focus on the relevancy of technology education, financial issues associated with the need for expensive equipment, and how technology is perceived to be a very ‘gendered’ field in some ways. We will also consider the need for educators to be continuously trained in technology, since the field can change rapidly and it is very important for educators to keep up to date.
An important issue in technology education is that information has to be relevant. Unlike many other fields such as maths, chemistry, English etc, which have a certain body of information or theory that does not change very often, most theory in technology fields is regularly changed, often drastically. Because of this there is a need to be constantly monitoring the state of technology and updating knowledge and skill-sets, as well as software and hardware. We will explore these issues in more depth later, but it can be seen as absolutely vital that what is taught in technology education is relevant to what skills are required in the real world.
As well as the requirement for technology education to be relevant in the sense that it is up to date, there is also the requirement for the learning to be relevant to the real world. Since so many different jobs in the real world use such a wide range of specialized software and hardware packages, there can be some argument made that the teaching of computing technology should be separated into more specific paths in secondary schools. For instance there is little use teaching the fine details of a graphic design program to a student whose skills are in mathematics and accounting, when they could be learning about accounting software packages. “…technological problem solving, through a focus upon a solution, should relate to each child's real life environment, allowing the child to make appropriate and meaningful connections from it.”
(Twyford & Jä-rvinen, 2000)
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