Technology A Reader for Writers

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.

About the Author

Johannah Rodgers is Assistant Professor in English and Rhetoric at The City University of New York.

1. Which Came First, Technology or Society? Exploring Various Uses and Definitions of Technology (Exploring What Technology Is, Was, and Might Be)
Thomas Hughes, "Defining Technology" The Human Built World: How to Think About Technology and Culture
Eric Schatzberg, "What Is Technology?" Rethinking Technology Blog
Sarah Murray, "Transition: Technology Puts Power In The Hands of Many" Financial Times
Leo Marx, "Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept" Technology and Culture
Kevin Kelly, "What Technology Wants" The Technium Blog
Neil Postman, "Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change"

2. Imagining Worlds: Does Science Fiction Inform Our Technological Reality?
Robert Sawyer, "The Purpose of Science Fiction" Slate.com
Neal Stephenson, "Innovation Starvation" World Policy Journal
Jon Turney, "Imagining Technology" NESTA
Kathryn Cramer, "On Science and Science Fiction" Hieroglyph.com
Damien Broderick, "Stranger Than You Can Imagine" Cosmos.com
Wendy Lesser, "Unearthly Powers" Threepenny Review
Michio Kaku, "Physics of the Impossible" Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel

3. (Dis)Connecting in a Digital Age: What Does It Mean To Be Social in an Age of Social Networking and What Is the Line Separating Humans and Machines?
Sherry Turkle, "Alone Together" Alone Together
Susan Maushart, "When My Kids Unplugged" Salon.com
Scott McCloud, "Media and Communication" Understanding Comics
Evgeny Morozov, "Machines of Laughter and Forgetting" The New York Times
Marcus, Gary, "Moral Machines" The New Yorker Blog
Rose Eveleth, "Robots: Is the Uncanny Valley Real?" BBC

4. Digital Literacy and Identity: How Is Technology Changing Readers and Writers?
Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic
Clay Shirky, "Does the Internet Make You Smarter?" The Wall Street Journal
Sam Leith, "What Does It All Meme?" Financial Times
Randall Munroe, "Simple Answers" xkcd: a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
Toby Litt, "The Reader and Technology" Granta
William Cronon, "Scholarly Authority in a Wikified World" Historians.org
Ursula LeGuin, "The Death of the Book"

5. Digital Education: What Can Technology Teach Us?
Diane Ravitch, "3 Dubious Uses of Technology in Schools" Scientific American
Craig Watkins, "Mobile Phones, Digital Media, and America's Learning Divide" DML Central
Andrew Delbanco, "MOOCs of Hazard" The New Republic
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
Collins, Alan and Richard Halverson "Rethinking Education in an Age of Technology" Northwestern School of Education and Social Policy
David Williamson Shaffer, Kurt R. Squire, Richard Halverson, And James P. Gee, "Video Games and the Future of Learning" Phi Delta Kappan

6. Digital (In)Equality and Politics: Is Technology Changing the World?
Kentaro Toyama, "Can Technology End Poverty?" Boston Review
Susan Davis, "Can Technology End Poverty?" Harvard Business School Blog
Jaron Lanier, "The Problem in Brief" Who Owns the Future?
John Naughton, "Digital Capitalism" The Guardian
Malcolm Gladwell, "Why the Revolution Will Not Be Retweeted" The New Yorker
Douglas Shuler, "Its Time to Work for a Better Internet" Internet Evolution

7. Can Humans Live Forever? Healthcare, the Environment and Technology
Francis Fukuyama, "Our Posthuman Future"
Daniel Callahan and Sherwin B. Nuland. "The Quagmire: How American Medicine is Destroying Itself" The New Republic
Eric Topol, "How Technology is Transforming Healthcare" Psychology Today
Atul Gawande, "Slow Ideas" The New Yorker
Francisco Seijo, "When Worlds Collide" The Breakthrough.org

Appendix: Researching and Writing About Technology