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Technology Education across Boundaries
Building: BUILDING C
Room: Keynote Theatre C105 ◉
Date: 2022-12-09 09:00 AM – 09:50 AM
Last modified: 2022-11-21
Abstract
Technology is ubiquitous and ethnically and culturally situated, influencing and impacting lives every second of everyday. As the human race emerged so too did technological developments. Different ethnic and cultural groups developed technologies and technological knowledge and processes to meet their emerging needs and realise opportunities such as trade. There is no doubt that some technological processes and knowledge travelled with people as they explored and spread around the world, others are likely to have evolved in parallel by different ethnic groups to meet their specific needs and situations. Thus, some technological knowledge and processes became unique to specific ethnic groups. Others were common across boundaries. Boundary is defined as something that indicates bounds or limits. Boundaries come in many different varieties in this paper the focus is on ethnic, cultural and geographical bounds. As human evolved from apes they became bipedal, thus freeing their hands for other tasks. This coupled with the emergence of the thumb enabled significant manipulation of the environment and materials, thus technological outcomes and processes emerged. As humans spread around the world so did their technological know-how. Survival across a range of geological locations and climates meant the modification of existing technologies and processes and emergence of others. This paper uses food preservation technologies and processes to illustrate that similar technologies emerged across geological cultural and time boundaries as humans sought to find solutions to food supply issues such as times of short supply such as during droughts and winter, in busy times and during travel. The paper identifies two key ideas that are of direct relevance to developing an understanding of the nature of technology; that technology has always been transformative and that technological development is not linear, at times developing in parallel across geographical and cultural boundaries.
Keywords
ethical and cultural positioning of technology education
Open access for this conference will begin on 2023-12-12.