Flashback: How to Unfold a Smartphone and Other Critical Tech Activities
Civics of Technology Announcements
Ghosts in the Machine AI Documentary Screening: Join our Civics of Tech community for an online screening of the new documentary, Ghosts in the Machine on Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 7:30pm EDT. Attendees will watch the screening separately and then be invited to a Zoom discussion with participants in the documentary including Thema Monroe-White. Civics of Tech has paid for the screening and you can join us clicking the “Get Tickets” button on this page. However, we have limited tickets so please only reserve tickets if you are sure you will be able to attend. We can add tickets if they sell out. Learn more on the documentary website.
Book Club: We’re also reading Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How We are Wrong about AI by Rua M. Williams. Join us on Wednesday, May 20th at 7:00 PM EST. You can register here and purchase the book here.
Critical Tech Hall of Fame: We are welcoming submissions for our forthcoming Critical Tech Hall of Fame. If you are interested in writing a submission, click here to submit your nomination by Sunday, April 30th.
We launched our Civics of Tech blog in January 2022, but our audience has grown substantively over the years. This week, we want to feature some of our curriculum pages that we haven’t shared in recently, but we still think hold up.
Unfolding a Smartphone Activities (developed by Ryan Smits and Dan Krutka): Even though smartphones were only introduced with Apple’s iPhone in 2007, many people can hardly imagine a world without them. In this activity, we will look back to technologies that came before the smartphone to answer the question: Are new technologies better than older versions? Students can interrogate technologies of time from before the invention of the clock to clock apps on our smartphones; technologies of wayfinding from before the invention of the compass to web mapping apps; and technologies of communication from the invention of language to the messages app. Find the lessons here.
Psychosocial Media Approach (developed by Cathryn van Kessel): As part of our “Mapping the Media Education Terrain” curriculum, Dr. van Kessel helped address a topic often ignored in media literacy approaches. The curriculum answers the question: How might your prior beliefs affect how you interact with media? A psychosocial approach to media education addresses both how our minds (psycho-) and society (-social) interact with and effect media experiences. This approach encourages students to reflect on feelings and recognizes that media content is often shared within networks, and by people, that affect how the media content is interpreted. Find the lesson here.
Technology Reset Simulation (developed by Dan Krutka): It is easy for people to get so used to older technologies that they start to see them as part of the natural world. How do we get students to develop their own beliefs about the role of technology in society when it can be so normalized? In this simulation, students are asked to leave a crumbling earth destroyed by technology and travel to a new world where they will assess which technologies to keep and which to discard. The activity asks students to develop a motto for the relationship with technology humans should pursue. Find the lesson here.
We welcome submissions for our curriculum page and authors retain rights to their work. Please use our Contact form to share your ideas.