Technology

Description

Read. Write. Oxford.

Technology: A Reader for Writers focuses on the timely and vital subject of information and communications technologies and presents a range of contemporary and classic articles that invite students to consider and engage with questions related to how, why, and in what ways we may be able to critically reflect on ourselves and societies by writing and thinking about technology. Accompanied by group-discussion questions and writing prompts that ask students to engage with many of the same information and communications technologies they are reading about, the readings in Technology: A Reader for Writers give students the opportunity to explore, learn, and write about technologies and the many issues and institutions related to them, including education, public policy, healthcare, social ethics, literacy practices, social activism, and global economics, in a unique, purpose-based, and hands-on manner.

Developed for the freshman composition course, Technology: A Reader for Writers includes an interdisciplinary mix of public, academic, and scientific reading selections, providing students with the rhetorical knowledge and compositional skills required to participate effectively in discussions about technology, science, and society.

Technology: A Reader for Writers is part of a series of brief single-topic readers from Oxford University Press designed for today's college writing courses. Each reader in this series approaches a topic of contemporary conversation from multiple perspectives.

Table of Contents

1. Which Came First, Technology or Society?
Thomas P. Hughes, "Defining Technology." Human-Built World: How to Think About Technology and Culture 2004
Eric Schatzberg, "What Is Technology?" Rethinking Technology Blog 2012
Sarah Murray, "Transition: Technology Puts Power In The Hands of Many." Financial Times 2013
Leo Marx, "Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept." Technology and Culture 2010
Kevin Kelly, "What Technology Wants." The Technium Blog 2009
Neil Postman, "Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change." Lecture 1998
2. Imagining Worlds: Does Science Fiction Inform Our Technological Reality?
Robert J. Sawyer, "The Purpose of Science Fiction." Slate.com 2011
Neal Stephenson, "Innovation Starvation." World Policy Journal 2011
Jon Turney, "Imagining Technology." NESTA 2013
Kathryn Cramer, "On Science and Science Fiction." Hieroglyph.com 1995
Damien Broderick, "Stranger Than You Can Imagine." Cosmos.com 2005
Wendy Lesser, "Unearthly Powers." Threepenny Review 2010
Michio Kaku, "Physics of the Impossible." Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel 2009
3. (Dis)Connecting in a Digital Age: What Does It Mean to Be Human in an Age of Social Media and "Intelligent" Machines?
Sherry Turkle, "Alone Together." Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other 2010
Susan Maushart, "When My Kids Unplugged." Salon.com 2011
Scott McCloud, "Media and Communication." Understanding Comics 1998
Evgeny Morozov, "Machines of Laughter and Forgetting." The New York Times 2013
Gary Marcus, "Moral Machines." The New Yorker Blog 2012
Rose Eveleth, "Robots: Is the Uncanny Valley Real?" BBC 2013
4. Digital Literacies and Identities: How Is Technology Changing Readers and Writers?
Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic 2008
Clay Shirky, "Does the Internet Make You Smarter?" The Wall Street Journal 2010
Sam Leith, "What Does It All Meme?" Financial Times 2011
Toby Litt, "The Reader and Technology." Granta 2012
William Cronon, "Scholarly Authority in a Wikified World." Historians.org 2012
Ursula K. LeGuin, "The Death of the Book." Blog Post 2012
5. Digital Education: What Can Technology Teach Us?
Diane Ravitch, "Promise and Peril." Scientific American 2013
S. Craig Watkins, "Mobile Phones, Digital Media, and America's Learning Divide." DML Central 2011
Andrew Delbanco, "MOOCs of Hazard" The New Republic 2013
SJSU Philosophy Department, "An Open Letter to Professor Michael Sandel [Regarding His JusticeX MOOC] from the Philosophy Department at the San Jose State University." The Chronicle of Higher Education 2013
David Williamson Shaffer, Kurt Squire, Richard Halverson, And James P. Gee, "Video Games and the Future of Learning." Phi Delta Kappan 2005
6. Digital (In)Equality and Politics: Is Technology Changing the World?
Kentaro Toyama, "Can Technology End Poverty?" Boston Review 2010
Susan Davis, "Can Technology End Poverty?" Harvard Business School Blog 2013
Jaron Lanier, "The Problem in Brief." Who Owns the Future? 2013
John Naughton, "Digital Capitalism Produces Few Winners." The Guardian 2013
Malcolm Gladwell, "Why the Revolution Will Not Be Retweeted." The New Yorker 2012
Douglas Schuler, "It's Time to Work for a Better Internet." Internet Evolution 2010
7. Can Humans Live Forever? Healthcare, the Environment, and Technology
Francis Fukuyama, "Our Posthuman Future." book excerpt 2003
Daniel Callahan and Sherwin B. Nuland. "The Quagmire: How American Medicine is Destroying Itself." The New Republic 2011
Eric Topol, "How Technology is Transforming Healthcare." The Creative Destruction of Medicine 2013
Atul Gawande, "Slow Ideas." The New Yorker 2013
Francisco Seijo, "When Worlds Collide." The Breakthrough.org 2012
Appendix: Researching and Writing About Technology