Educationalising digitalisation: Towards a new perspective on technology education

In its first part, this paper will attempt to point out some of the underlying assumptions and contradictions inherent in contemporary discourses on the 'digitalisation of education', which have largely shifted away from viewing technology instrumentally as a means to an end and have instead begun to ascribe to it a 'primary' status, sometimes portraying it as a general condition for all educational endeavours or as an agent of educational development. Subsequently, we will try to show what it would mean to consider the elements of this question from a reverse perspective, as 'educationalising digitalisation', which would mean subjecting digitalisation and modern technology in general to reflection through educational purposes. In the second part, relying on the concepts of empowerment and understanding, we will try to justify the reasons for a new approach to 'technology education' that focuses neither on the efficient use of technology nor on the retroactive damage management of its 'side effects'. Instead, we will attempt to demonstrate the necessity of capturing individual technologies technologies and the maxims of their potential effects (before they happen) as objects of reflection, thus revealing and helping to understand their designs and potentialities. This paper argues that such a reflection is becoming essential for ethical agency in the so-called tech-driven world.