We used quotes about technology in the classroom and you’ll never believe what happened next
By Dan Krutka and Jacob Pleasants
One of our aims at the Civics of Technology project is to encourage critical thinking about technology with the aim of more educational experiences and just futures. Technology criticism has a long history so, where can we start? In a capitalist technopoly where progress and culture can be defined by our newest products, we needed an activity that could draw on the history of scholarship and ideas without overwhelming students.
In this post, we introduce you to the first of several “Technology Education Introductory Activities” that you can access from our Curriculum page and try out in your context. This “Technology Quote Activity” is often the first of the activities we teach in the larger workshop we have been running with teachers, teacher candidates, and middle school students in over 10 classes over the past few months. This activity was created to encourage workshop participants to consider critical interpretations of technology that go beyond simply seeing technology as progress. In this activity, we use critical and interesting quotes about technology as an accessible entry into the long history of technology criticism. Discussing quotes allows students and teachers to bring their prior experiences, beliefs, and ideas to the topic. Educators can use all the quotes in full, choose some and exclude others, or use simplified versions of the quotes.
This is a simplified version of the Technology Quote Activity that Dan used with 7th grade students.
What does the Technology Quote Activity Entail?
As the name implies, the Technology Quote Activity involves students reading, reflecting on, and discussing critical quotes about technology. Each of us—Dan and Jacob—teaches the activity a little differently so we will each share our different approaches. We use this activity as the first thing we do with participants in a larger technology education workshop.
Dan usually starts by posing a supporting question for the activity: What are different ways to think about technology? This question invites students into an ongoing debate which he hopes they will participate in. He then provides three questions for students to consider before turning them to the quotes: What do you believe each quote means? How does the source and year of each quote affect how you view it? Which quote most resonates with you—for better or worse? However, he doesn’t ask them to turn in answers to these questions. They just provide some ideas for participants in case they’re unclear on why they’re reviewing the quotes.
Probably the hardest part of this activity has been choosing the quotes. We have each used different quotes in different sessions. Here are some of our favorites:
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. — Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1962
We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. — John Culkin, Saturday Review, 1967
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. — Audre Lorde, Institute for the Humanities conference talk, 1979
Our tools are not always at our beck and call. The less we know about them, the more likely it is that they will command us, rather than the other way around. — Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mothers, 1983
Technology giveth and technology taketh away. — Neil Postman, Technopoly, 1992
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. — Ian Malcolm (fictional), Jurassic Park, 1993
Indigenous peoples across the globe have developed technologies since pre-history. Tools for building, measuring, carving, hunting, holding, preserving food, making clothing, for communicating across distances… Indigenous technology is pragmatic, it is responsive and responsible to the ecology in which it lives and from which it came. — Native Science Academy, 2007
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things. — Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt, 2002
On the Internet and in our everyday uses of technology, discrimination is embedded in computer code and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence technologies that we are reliant on, by choice or not... We are only beginning to understand the long- term consequences of these decision- making tools in both masking and deepening social inequality. — Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression, 2018
Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration. — Chris Gilliard (@hypervisible) and Guy McHendry (@acaguy), sticker, 2021
Choosing which quotes to use is hard. In fact, Dan only learned Jacob was using the exceptional Ruth Schwartz Cowan quote upon writing this blog post, but has already added it for future use (shameless plug: Register for our More Work for Mother book club this summer on our Events page). We are always looking for quotes that show critical perspectives and ideas. Please share your favorite quotes in the comments (with the source and year) and we will add them as options for this activity on the site.
When we’ve taught the activity in person, we do so as a “gallery walk” where we print out each quote and post them around the room. We allow students to meander the room, reading the quotes, “tagging” them with meaningful comments or drawings, and discussing them with others. Both of us primarily listen to students’ conversations and only join the discussion when invited or when a student seems like they are looking for someone to chat with. Jacob usually just has had in-service teachers chat with each other about the quotes that resonated with them before moving into the next part of the workshop without too much additional discussion of the quotes. Dan has encouraged whole class discussion where students share which quote most resonated with them and explain why.
What have we learned from teaching the Technology Quote Activity?
Neither of us necessarily “do” a whole lot of instruction around these quotes, nevertheless we’ve found that the activity serves an important purpose in these technology education workshops. Primarily, it is a point of entry into a conceptual space that most workshop participants do not have very much experience navigating. It’s easy to forget that most people have probably not encountered many of the perspectives within these quotes before. They don’t spend their team reading critiques or apologies for modern technology. While they might be familiar with criticisms around particular technologies, the more broad-scale claims advanced by these quotes is probably a novel conceptual space. Thus, this activity serves as a very low-stakes way for participants to familiarize themselves with the kinds of conversations that can occur.
The activity also provides us as workshop facilitators an opportunity to gauge our participants’ experience with these ideas. Some participants have surprised us by how many of these ideas they’ve already thought about. This was both true when Jacob worked with in-service teachers and when Dan did a simplified version of the activity with six classes of 7th graders recently. Some groups of participants have also surprised us with which quotes resonated with them and which ones didn’t (We’ve had some very techno-optimistic groups!). Thus, this activity not only helps our participants orient themselves, but lets us—as instructors—orient ourselves to them.
The following image is an example of how teachers marked up a quote in one of Jacob’s workshops:
We each save our participants’ reactions to the quotes because they are always intriguing, and we sometimes refer back to certain quotes at later points during the workshop. Dan appreciated, for instance, teacher candidates’ surprise at the age of Thoreau’s quote in jotting down, “Wow! 1854! This could've been written today!” and “If something from 1854 is still so relevant in 2022, we have a lot of reassessing to do with our relationship to technology.” Dan hopes these observations might encourage students to see that many critical questions about technology are not new, but have long histories.
Of course, some students' responses, particularly with the limited context (source and year), make for fun discussions. Dan laughed at a response to the 1962 Arthur C. Clarke quote which stated that “science was not taken into consideration.” Of course, without knowing who Arthur C. Clake was, this interpretation is plausible, but this observation can turn into an intriguing discussion about why an avid science writer, science-fiction writer, and inventor might say that “advanced technology” is like “magic.” If we are often in awe of our technologies and unaware of even how they work, can we be in control of them? How do citizens, for example, challenge an algorithm they don’t fully understand?
Teacher candidates responses to Safiya Noble’s 2018 quote were encouraging:
Dan quickly learned that many students in the class had viewed the 2020 Coded Bias documentary that he had included when helping to design their learning technologies class. This information allowed him to draw on examples from the film later in the workshop. We have both found this Technology Quote Activity helpful in drawing on students’ prior experiences and beliefs, encouraging critical inquiry into technology, and providing us—as instructors—a sense of their thinking.
We created a page for this Technology Quote Activity which you can access through our Curriculum page. The page includes a link to make a copy of Google slides that you can print out and use in your class for a Technology Quote gallery walk. We hope to see other educators use this activity (tell us how it goes!) or remix it for specific purposes (maybe only quotes from critical or ecological perspectives, or on specific topics). We’d love to hear what you think and please drop your ideas, feedback, and most importantly, favorite quotes in the comments.