NanoScienceWorks

Miguel F. Aznar

I have long been fascinated by how we understand and evaluate technology. The patterns underlying our tools became clear over years, starting even before I studied electrical engineering and computer science at the UC Berkeley and continuing through 1998 founding of KnowledgeContext, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation that helps young people think critically about technology. KNnowledgeContext has attracted a diverse team of teachers, technologists, and businesspeople to develop curriculum on understanding and evaluating technology. Through its website, KnowledgeContext has provided that curriculum to well over a thousand teachers and now also offers it in wiki form, enabling open collaboration on new versions of the curriculum.

The curriculum is based on a simple strategy for understanding and evaluating technology. In 2004, I brought that strategy to COSMOS, a summer program for mathematics and science at the University of California at Santa Cruz. There may be no better argument for the importance of understanding and evaluating our tools than the power of nanotechnology. While we may be content with simply knowing how to operate many of our technologies, the extraordinary costs and benefits - both existing and promised - of nanotechnology make clear that the future of civilization depends on collaborative, context-aware, critical thinking. With this realization, in 2005 I focused the strategy on nanotechnology, using it to structure an intensive course for precocious high school students in the COSMOS program, which I have been teaching and refining since.

Coincident with creating my nanotechnology course in 2005, I joined Foresight Institute as a director of education. The Foresight Institute is the leading think tank and public interest institute on nanotechnology. Founded in 1986, Foresight was the first organization to educate society about the benefits and risks of nanotechnology. For a teacher of nanotechnological literacy, Foresight was an obvious fit.

I serve as an executive director of KnowledgeContext and on the advisory boards of both the Nanoethics Group and the Acceleration Studies Foundation. I have presented at educational conferences, including Computer Using Educators (CUE), California Educational Research Association (CERA), and California League of Middle Schools (CLMS). I have keynoted educational conferences, including Consortium for Research on Educational Accountability and Teacher Evaluation (CREATE), Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers for Technology (PT3), and California Middle Grades Partnership Network (CMGPN). Google invited me to present a Tech Talk on Technological literacy.

Prior to entering education, I was a in management consulting (Ernst & Young, AT&T) and software engineering (Amdahl, Open Systems Development). I was a Phi Beta Kappa at UC Berkeley and presided over the Tau Beta Pi engineering honors society while studying there.

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