Technology Trends and Issues

Defining Technological Literacy

Given the current state of technology, a researcher should have little difficulty in finding relevant definitions that embody a spirited understanding of underlying technical and societal interactions that craft a view of the technically literate person. As an exercise, extracting the common elements from various experts’ definitions of technological literacy should result in a generalized perspective that would provide a foundation supporting further literacy definitions for aspects of technology such as computers or genetics. However, this is easier than it sounds. As Gagel (1997) confirms, “defining technological literacy has proven to be an unexpectedly complex and difficult task”.

The difficulty in defining technological literacy is exposed by a number of factors. One factor relates to understanding perspective and determining whether the term is best defined by putting the emphasis on “technology” or “literacy” or whether the subject is best approached laterally. Indeed, Gagel describes the technological