I was particularly interested to read Serge Pothof's [26 Apr 95] view that we should teach ABOUT technologies, presumably in a context of use and goals. There has been a view around for some years in the educational technology literature that we should be at pains to make technology "transparent" in teaching and learning processes. I have long been uncomfortable with that view, because it assumes a "transparency" or "neutrality" for technologies which tends to hide their cultural role in present day societies.
When I was a language teacher (some years ago now) I tried to work within the then current assumption that the "mediating technologies" of content (and I include here both audiovisual and information technologies AND, for example, the mechanics of grammar which pass unnoticed in real-time communications) should be "hidden" in order to precipitate fluency. I no longer teach languages, but I think that set of assumptions was probably as wrong for the "internal" technologies of languages as for "external" technologies of information and communication.
We have given considerable attention over the past decade at least to the importance of metacognition in learning processes (virtually unrecognized as a category in the 1920s). This emphasis on taking control through understanding of one's own strategic thinking processes seems to me to be paralleled by the need to understand the EXTERNAL technologies which mediate our "distributed cognitions" and communications in whatever field of activity.