Post-modernism and I are not friends either. But you don’t have to be sympathetic to that way of thinking to appreciate Heiddegger. He’s at least provocative. The point of reading his essay is not to convince ourselves that he’s right, but to get us to consider points of view which we might not otherwise have considered.

Ah! The chicken and the egg. You can’t hatch me on that one. You can’t hatch me on postmodernism either. Heidegger was a postmodernist. For him there was no real past. It’s questionable if there was any ‘real’ reality. So it’s not surprising, by association, you mention that technology is not tools.

The postmodernist can invent anything, any concept and reinvent the meaning for any word, including technology, for the past is always conveniently eschewed.

Unfortunately their communicative powers bring us back to the chicken and egg. They look in on themselves like the cat licking its butt, and end up disappearing along a black hole to nowhere.

Tools are technology.

To believe that we could possibly centre our argument on scissors growing on trees illustrates the ridiculousness of it all, for it is so far removed from reality it begs the question about tools in the first place.

No I don’t think I’m splitting hairs. Your tree-grown scissors might have a better chance

Catchya later
from Middle-earth

I’ve been harping about this for years.

I agree that “technology is not neutral” and has a philosophical aspect. It would be fair, I think, to claim that technology and philosophy overlap. But then so do technology and physics, technology and math, technology and language, etc. Technology is not a clearly delineated, orthogonal, subject area.

You state that:

“I’m starting to see the field of technology as a quasi-religious system based on assumptions of progress, constant change, individualism, distrust/disdain for established structures of society, and hope for an every expanding brighter future”

It is important to place things in context. “Technology” does not spring, fully formed into common use directly from philosophy. What we commonly consider as technology is a result of chaotic interaction between problems, solutions, businesses, markets, fashions and history. For every household name or popular craze there are thousands of failures or struggling, minor, successes.

From this viewpoint it might be equally tempting to state “technology is economics”, but my point is that that would be just as naive as to claim that “technology is philosophy”.

In an educational context, the contemplation of what technology “is” certainly seems to qualify as philosophy, but that does not imply to me that technology is (only) philosophy. I agree with commenter Brad Ovenell-Carter when he states

“schools that spend their time and energy fretting over what tools to use, instead of exploring how the technology might change the game, have already taken themselves out of the play.”

Have a read of Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology? He makes a profound investigation of our relationship to technology and a convincing argument that technology is not neutral. The problem for Heidegger is not the existence of technology or the forms it takes, but our orientation to it. (And he makes a typically obtuse investigation: this guide is helpful.

But the point here is that technology is not tools; it’s human activity. And Siemens is right: We (educators) need to understand that this discussion of technology in schools is about the discussion of human activity–that’s a philosophical study, I’d say.

This Thursday and Friday I’ll be at the Canadian Association of Independent Schools Best Practices Conference in Montreal presenting sitting on a panel and presenting a talk on the very idea Siemens presents here: Borrowing from Heidegger, I’m arguing that the essence of Web 2.0 is by no means anything technological. And so schools that spend their time and energy fretting over what tools to use, instead of exploring how the technology might change the game, have already taken themselves out of the play.

Thank you for these ideas on the usage of technology today.

It’s not as if technology has just arrived or just evolved. It has been with humankind since the first use of any tool, obviously – like fire has. Fire can be very sophisticated and by a stretch of the imagination its many and various manifestations can be seen to be a technology. Is fire philosophy too? Or is it just part of the wider philosophy?

Philosophy is a study. Its basis is in critical, generally systematic approaches and it relies on reasoned argument.

Technology is tools. Technology is not a study in itself though there are several philosophies on the use of technology. Further, it has no associated basis in reasoned argument.

I wonder at your posit that ‘technology is philosophy’, and I would be interested in your opinion on what I put here.

Catchya later
from Middle-earth