The term technology has been defined in countless ways. The research programme Future Technologies, Culture and Learning Processes uses professionals’ own descriptions of how they understand technology as a starting point. This reveals a popular understanding of technology as material electronic artefacts. We also understand technology as wielding cultural power: technology is dynamic, transforms culture and cannot be understood in purely instrumental terms.
Encounters between people and technology engender learning that requires alignment – a convergence of understandings. As such, not only do people reshape technology through different understandings and applications, technology co-creates people’s ways of becoming.
We conduct research on future technologies; technologies which may still be emerging and which therefore present us with important questions regarding their future effects. Characteristic of the research projects within the programme is the quest to understand new technologies that affect people’s everyday lives and technologies that contain a potential for change.
Among the programme’s objectives is to suggest ways in which new technology can enhance learning. This is done by studying how the human-technology relationship can be improved to ensure technology does not set the agenda, but is used in conscious and considered ways. Learning produced by new technology is the result of people’s relationships with the technology and the social space in which they encounter it. It is therefore of interest to understand the ways in which technologies transform and are transformed as they go from being produced in one social space to being applied in another social space.
