Learning how everything is connected: research in holistic and cross-cultural indigenous technacy education

As regional populations close in on each other and cultures connect across continents, the demand for fresh ideas becomes critical to our common future. This paper presents a collection of key ideas from cross-cultural technacy research and advocates a new branch for technological thought development from Kindergarten to Adulthood based on the idea of learning how technological understanding is necessarily always an interconnected sociocultural, ecological and systemic form of knowing. This paper also forms a part of the Symposium: ‘(Re)visioning Technological Learning and Thinking – the Clifftop Manifesto for Educational Change’(Elshof, Keirl, McLaren, and Seemann, 2010). It supports the manifesto’s ethics of an education that is: informed by a different consciousness which accommodates complexity, holism and the interaction of systems; is guided by an ecological insight foundational to life; and draws particular attention to the call to celebrate the ingenuity of cultures and their diversity.