Must Read Books about Technology
by Dan Krutka
One of our aims at the Civics of Technology project is to create community around our shared affinity around thinking critically, and teaching, about technology. We hope to create spaces where we can not only take up the work of technology education, but also find joy in doing so. On Thursday, March 24th we held a March Madness “Must Read” books about technology livestream event that encapsulated these aims. You can watch the livestream here:
The purpose of the event was to identify books about technology we could read together. Big thank you to our fantastic participants in the event who each had 90 seconds for each of their two book pitches: Earl Aguilera, Marie Heath, Lance Mason, Phil Nichols, Jacob Pleasants, and Leigh Graves Wolf. Congratulations to Dr. Aguilera for nominating the winning book, Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism by Christo Sims.
You can see the full scoreboard below:
Every book nominated generated interesting conversation and offers so much to our field! You can review each book and the participant who nominated them on these slides.
Our next step is to organize books clubs around the top three books from our event. We are tentatively planning on reading the top three books over the next 6 months with two months reserved to read each… we plan to read each by the end of each month listed below:
May 2022: Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism by Christo Sims (nominated by Earl Aguilera)
July 2022: More Work for Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave by Ruth Schwartz Cowan (available for free via Internet Archive; nominated by Philip Nichols)
September 2022: The Design of Everyday Things, Revised And Expanded Edition by Donald A. Norman (nominated by Jacob Pleasants)
The specific times and details of Zoom meetings are forthcoming, but if you’re interested, you can go ahead and acquire a copy of the books. Please leave a comment below for the book you plan to read and we’ll be sure to contact you. Each of us can consider, how can reading compelling books about technology together help us be better scholars and educators of that advance just futures? The next step is to find out together.