Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2001 11:43:06 -0400
From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." <bradmcc-AT-cloud9.net>
Subject: Re: your opinion


"Wilkerson, Richard" wrote:
> 
> Just a note on this:
> 
> At 11:32 AM 8/18/01 -0300, you wrote:
> >Hi there. My name is Anthony and im interested on any opinion you have
> >about how technology affects the acquistion of knowledge, helping or
> >limiting it.
> >
> >i will appreciate a lot if someone can send me a few words about this issue.
> >
> >thankyou ....
> 
>     If we see technology as any extension used to achieve an ends, then the
> jaw, the eye, the expanded brain all become technology.  If we keep going,
> then writing and text become technologies, ideas and dreams become
> technologies. Perspectives are technology.  In this sense, all knowledge is
> technology.
[snip]

Well said!

And, just as we are learning that the growth of scientific knowledge
is in a synergistic feedback loop with the development of technical
instruments (nobody without a cyclotron could inhabit a universe
with subatomic particles in it, and there is no "physical
universe" without uniform printed editions of books!), so also do we need to
appreciate that all facts are value judgments and all feelings
make factual assertions about the world.  

Technical workers (who include everybody from sysadmins to
neurosurgeons...) need to
see the ethical dimensions of their work, and, especially, PhDs
need to become what they are nominally certified to be:
Lovers of wisdom with especial competence to teach and to
heal in the disciplinary area in which their degree was bestowed.

In this regard, it is heartening to note that some engineering
curricula now include engineering ethics

    http://onlineethics.org/

And The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's press
is among the top publishers of substantive books in
contemporary humanistic disciplines (Husserlian phenomenology,
etc.).

Tuesday's airplane hijackings showed that
cell phones can attain to the dimension of the sacramental,
if we think such words as: "Wherever two or three are
gathered together in My Name then I am among them", in their
universal human (and not merely ethnographic) meaning:

     http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/duty.html#pelb

The telos of technology shall have been fully
realized when we technologists get beyond raising
the Kursk to raising the dead -- although, for the
time being, it will be a step forward if we
struggle against all forms of "cost effectiveness"
and for *quality*, both in the product of our work
and also in the conditions of life of both the
users and the workers.  For the workers' (and,
of course, the users') form of life -- their, i.e., *our* WORLD --
is the co-product of every work process, whatever
its nominal "product".

"Yours in discourse...."

+\brad mccormick      

-- 
  Let your light so shine before men, 
              that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)

  Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)

<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc-AT-cloud9.net
-----------------------------------------------------------------
  Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/


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