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Technology Assessment: A Graduate Course To Build Decision-Making Skills

Abstract

The decision to adopt and use a technological innovation is often accompanied with a broad range of undesirable impacts upon the health and welfare of individuals, society, and the environment. As innovations become more complex, it becomes increasingly important that engineers, consumers, and citizens build assessment skills which will enable them to make better informed, sound decisions regarding the choice to adopt, use, and dispose of innovations. For almost a decade, Technology Use and Assessment, a graduate online course, has provided opportunities for technology educators to develop skills in assessing and predicting the possible impacts of technological innovations. This course serves as a model for building technology assessment skills for non-engineers. It combines a problem-based, collaborative pedagogy with the examination of contemporary problems, such as energy opportunities of the American roof, impacts of the American lawn, non-occupational hearing protection, and residential heating in the next fifty years. Students build data-gathering, data-analysis, and decision-making skills by developing alternative action scenarios based upon trends and other predictive models.

Introduction

There are inextricable links among technology, society, and the environment. Technology—the knowledge, process, tools, and artifacts by which humans modify nature to meet their needs and desires [1]—enables efficient economic productivity and a very comfortable standard of living for U.S. citizens. However, with each new technological innovation, humans, deliberately or inadvertently, alter the balance of biotic and abiotic systems in the environment which often degrades the ability of ecosystems to persevere. In addition, the adoption of technological innovation necessitates changes within our social systems (e.g., educational, legal, political, and economic systems) as individuals and communities coordinate their efforts to design, manage, use, and dispose of these technological products and by-products.

As technology grows more complex and ubiquitous, it is increasingly important that all members of our society become better, more-informed assessors and decision-makers about technology. In essence, the challenges of our modern age demand that future citizens become technologically literate, i.e., able “to use, manage, assess and understand technology” [2](p.7), in order to approach and, hopefully, achieve sustainability.

Within U.S. public schools, technology education (TE) is a curricular program dedicated to enhancing the technological literacy of students in grades K-12. As articulated by the fairly recent Standards for Technological Literacy (STL) [2], twenty content standards and their associated benchmarks “prescribe the content knowledge and abilities of what students should know and be able to do in order to be technologically literate” (p. 12). Among these standards are three which directly relate to the interrelationships among technology, society, and the environment, including: 4. Students will develop an understanding of the cultural, social, economic, and political effects of technology.

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Rose, M., & Flowers, J. (2008, June), Technology Assessment: A Graduate Course To Build Decision Making Skills Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--3217