Best practice: The Teacher
You are a teacher educating students on (their relation with) technology. Maybe you teach app-development and want to teach how to think harder about the impact of technology. Maybe you teach health care and want your students to think about using technology effectively. Maybe you want to organize a beginner course. Maybe you just want to make your students aware of the impact of technology and change their mindset.
Example User Story: ‘As a teacher in Digital Marketing/health care/logistics/child education I want my students to be aware of the impact that technology has on them as a person and later as a professional.’
Time period: This a best practice mainly for short sessions. Workshop from one to four hours. Longer courses are also possible.
Target audience: Students in all kind of education. Employees in relevant business settings. Every person today that has to think about their relationship with technology.
The Best Practice
There are a lot of different ways you can inspire students/people to think about their relationship with technology. We give you some suggestions, you can mix and match the different options. The online courses: Using the material from the crash courses (available November 2020) you can provide a plenary introduction about the impact of technology on ten categories. All crash courses take one hour to complete. We found it very effective to combine the crash courses with analyzing technologies. So, for example, do the crash course on privacy and then have the students analyse a certain app, and then discuss the results.
Short introduction (workshop): Download the blank canvas for a Quick Scan or an Improvement Scan and challenge the audience to fill out the canvases on a certain technology. Of course you can also do this exercise online and print out the results. We found this very useful for students who later have to create technology, but it is also inspiring for everyone that lives in a world filled with technology. And that is everyone. To add depth to the thinking, you can provoke participants to discuss each other's results. Filling out scans and then asking participants to provide critical feedback on each other’s work, is very effective.
Discuss Sample Cases: The Technology Impact Cycle Tool has a lot of assessed technologies available. Examples like ‘Re.Inc The Griefbot,’ ‘Corona Contact App,’ and ’Baby Don’t Cry’ (all easily found in the public cycles) can be discussed with or even challenged by students.
Remember: the Technology Impact Cycle Tool is designed – as much as possible – not to be normative. There is no right or wrong. The only thing that can be wrong, is that you have not given it enough thought. We found that an open discussion in which all opinions have a place works really well.
Go back to other best practices