Abstract
Technology is a compulsory subject at Swedish elementary schools and, according to the syllabus, helps students develop their ability to examine different technological solutions and reason how these solutions affect society, environment, and humans. An important challenge for educational research is to analyse and understand the consequences and impacts of technologies on students’ learning, well-being, and participation in society. It is important to understand how technological systems work in order to orient oneself in modern society and to make well-informed decisions about what is good or bad use of technology. The purpose of this study is to further explore students’ understanding of technological systems and their features through investigating the students’ reasoning and collaboration in small-group interactions. We found a relatively large number of situations where students clearly demonstrate that they understand technological systems and the components and relationships among them. On the other hand, some situations indicate that students have difficulty explaining and understanding or realising concepts, theories, and relationships regarding technological systems. The findings need to be examined critically, although the students in this study were not used to this way of working with concepts or using images in their presentations. The study was conducted in the spring of 2016 at a compulsory school in the south of Sweden.
Highlights
In most Western countries, technology plays an increasingly important role as integrated parts of our way of living, thinking, and acting
We argue that an important challenge for educational research is to analyse and understand the consequences and impacts of technologies on students’ learning, well-being, and participation in society
In the first example, Billie, Nina and Robyn discuss different technological systems, the ingoing components and the relationship between them based on the images they have chosen as support for their presentation
Summary
In most Western countries, technology plays an increasingly important role as integrated parts of our way of living, thinking, and acting. Säljö (2012) points to the development of hybrid minds, where humans’ cognitive and communicative activities are increasingly dependent upon and intertwined with complex and powerful technological tools In this way, technology may be described as human integrated systems that are connected to each other in web-like worlds, involved in society and in our lives to an extent that we risk taking them for granted. An important and related issue is to explore how students understand this development of integrated technological systems and how it affects their lives In this context, Klasander (2010) asserts that a high level of student awareness of technology and technological systems is crucial as we all are dependent on them, to some extent, and occasionally become parts of such systems. Several researchers in the field (Hallström and Klasander 2017; Klasander 2010; Koski and de Vries 2013) have pointed out that the most common way of describing technological systems in education today is to use linear or hierarchical models in which the components are stacked without explaining how they are interrelated and work together
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
