Teknik - genomskinlig eller svart låda? : Att bruka, se och förstå teknik - en fråga om kunskap

Sammanfattning: Human history is to a great extent the history of people's relationship to artifacts and thereby to technology. This study is mainly concerned with the present-day situation of this interaction between people and technology, in a broad sense of the word.Two problems are discussed:-- how do children, young people, and adults understand the concept of technology and the phenomena comprised by this term?-- how do children, young people, and adults understand and use mechanical, everyday technology and electronic computer processing?The study has an explorative and descriptive point of view. The aim has been to observe, characterize, and give form to "the understanding of technology." A hermeneutic perspective has been dominant. The method for data collecting has been interviews and a combination of interviews and observations.The interview material provides knowledge of a group of people's view of technology. The results can be summarized with the help of four categories: artifacts, human-made objects; mode of procedure, practical skills; competence, knowledge; mentality, thought patterns with varying degrees of articulation. By placing these categories in this particular order, it is also possible to display the order in which children and young people apparently develop a successively fuller picture of what "technology" means.The informants were provided the opportunity to show their knowledge about examples of everyday technology and the way they used them by drawing, talking about, and using a pair of scissors and a computer. A three-dimensional model was constructed using four categories of knowledge: assertive knowledge, critical knowledge, proficiency knowledge and intimate knowledge. The results showed that the informants had concrete and in many respects broad knowledge of and about technology according to this model.In the conduding remarks, the results were put in a perspective that is important for today in association with the mandatory, since 1994, subject of technology in the compulsory school system. The subject and its teaching need to be developed in many respects. In a related discussion of the results, the concept of "teknikbildning" (technical "schooling") is addressed.