New Lesson: Interrogating the Smartphone
Civics of Tech Announcements
Next Monthly Tech Talk Tuesday, 12/05/23. Join our monthly tech talks to discuss current events, articles, books, podcast, or whatever we choose related to technology and education. There is no agenda or schedule. Our next Tech Talk will be Tuesday, December 5th, 2023 at 8-9pm EST/7-8pm CST/6-7pm MST/5-6pm PST. Learn more on our Events page and register to participate.
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by Dan Krutka
Last week, we shared how we have updated our site with three lines of inquiry that we’ve pursued in our Civics of Technology community. This week, we’ll share a new practitioner article that fits in our technoskepticism category.
We previously shared the larger research study where Scott Metzger, Zack Seitz, and I analyzed how state social standards framed technology. In short, we contended that standards didn’t do much to position teachers to encourage students to critically think deeply about technological change. Thus, we suggested 5 technoskeptical questions that built off a 1998 Neil Postman talk. These questions became a core part of our curriculum on the Civics of Technology site.
Scott Metzger and I recently published a new practitioner article in Social Education, which is sponsored by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), that applied our 5 technoskeptical questions to a technology that we see as particularly influential: the smartphone. In the article, we encourage a technoskeptical inquiry with three activities:
Prior Knowledge: Inquire with students into different definitions of “technology”
Background: Investigate the technical dimension of a technology’s larger history
Application: Inquire into collateral effects of technology through five question
This article gives more attention to the technical history of the smartphone than I typically would as a social studies educator. This is due to Scott’s uncommon knowledge of technological advancements for someone in the humanities. For the application section, we authored activities to accompany each of the technoskeptical questions. This lesson works well in a social studies classroom, but can really be used in any area that wants to think more deeply about smartphones.
You can read the full article on the Social Education journal site. As of this writing, the article is open access, but please let us know if you are not able to access it.
We hope sharing our scholarship—both research studies and practitioner articles—is helpful for educators. Our primary goal as an organization is to cultivate knowledge, conversations, and resources that help teachers as they encourage students to inquire into technological change for more just futures.
Reference
Metzger, S. M., & Krutka, D. G. (2023). Interrogating the smartphone: Teaching through technoskeptical questions. Social Education, 87(5), 313-318.