TCLP 2007-12-19 Rant: Tech Illiteracy (Comment Line 240-949-2638)
Posted by cmdln on December 19th, 2007
This is a feature cast.
The hacker word of the week this week is crawling horror.
The feature this week is a rant on my concerns about the acceptance of technological illiteracy amongst our leaders. While the problem is not new, my thoughts were spurred by this Washington Post op-ed.
Download the show directly. Grab the detailed show notes with time offsets and additional links either as PDF or OPML.
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January 3rd, 2008 at 4:03 pm
My blog post reacts to your podcast:
http://www.ddmcd.com/managing-technology/the-who-and-what-of-technological-illiteracy.html
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Who and what are excellent follow up questions, Dennis. As for who, I think starting with the congress critters may be more feasible than the public at large. I agree that educating the public is important, too, as they are those who put the congress people in power and a gap between the elected representative and constituency’s levels of technological literacy may be as bad as ignorance all around.
What is an even more fascinating question. To me it dovetails with many of my concerns about the state of public education in the US. A laundry list is easy to think about but prone to going stale. The admittedly harder challenge but ultimately more sustainable answer is teaching representatives and/or their staff how to better reason about the ever changing state of technology. I liken it to the deliberative polls approach Lessig mentions in the final chapter of Code 2.0 in response to pulse polls. We don’t need to lead them to a particular answer, just improve their ability to reason and deliberate.