Phases of Technacy Expectations and Complexity.

TECHNACY COMPLEXITY EXPECTATIONS are arranged in three broad PHASES (columns) to guide the Educator. They describe increasing exposure to contextual and systemic complexity of technological application. It progresses learner-expectations from the Emergent Phase typified by simple, egocentric, safe, tangible, and known knowledge. Then progressing towards the credentialed or peer approved phase of culturally codified, legislated and domesticated knowledge where applied solutions can be wholly demonstrated by one or a few people working together for a set range of defined purpose and the context parameters.

From the Competent Phase learners are then expected to progress to technology projects that demand attention to complexity, altruistic disposition, risky by high return potential, intangible factors to accommodate, highly contingent drivers, and abstraction dependent knowledge for a project at this high technacy phase to 'work' in its context application.

These expectations build up in an accumulative way from the EMERGENT PHASE of human scale projects with low risk, small unit production, and simple context drivers, to the normalised and COMPETENT PHASE of culturally or institutionally peer endorsed (or certified) standards, and finally to the difficult to sustain SOPHISTICATED PHASE where the purpose and applied context presents many unknown variables, are often under moral debate and the technology solution is too large, small, socially or ecologically complex or remote for any individual to undertake on their own.