Fear and knowing, teaching, and technology

Reading Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach. I unfortunately returned this book before capturing the thought, but I guess I could get into this with Bob Covert. Here's the thing: Palmer has this thing about fear: teachers are afraid, students are afraid; objectivist ways of knowing are motivated by or shot through with fear or at least the need to control.

I don't know if I buy the whole thing, but there's something in there.

First, I definitely agree that teaching involves a certain amount of terror (of exposure, of losing control, of being mocked).

Second, certain approaches to learning involve terror, whether socially (fear of embarrassment in front of one's peers) or even in more abstracted way -- fear of not knowing the important bits or making a rookie mistake, confusing signal for noise the way an expert never would. And these two wires can link up as well: I want to be well-read and worldly, and yet I can't immediately pick up on the Aldrich Ames name-check at a dinner party. Whoops. In a history class, I just learned about secret Nazi-Soviet military cooperation PRIOR to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact; when at a friend's house for dinner, I was terrified as I discussed this and had to fly in the face of his dad's decades of casual reading about the topic. Even now, before I could write about it, I had to look it up and confirm that I wasn't crazy, that I hadn't misunderstood the whole thing. (For future reference: see Pariahs, Partners, Predators: German-Soviet Relations, 1922-1941, by Aleksandr M. Nekrich, edited and translated by Gregory L. Freeze. New York, Columbia University Press, 1997. See also review in 1998 Canadian Journal of History, gently re-directing Nekrich's interpretation of the data.)

Third, a learner who learned in fear becomes a teacher who teaches in fear and uses techniques that quite possibly also inflict fear upon his/her learners.

Also, I think there's a further step to take: something along the lines of "technology and fear" -- I think fear plays a large role in the way people feel about technology and what they choose to do (or not do) with technology. True, I try to stick technology into everything, but so it goes. Besides: content knowledge + pedagogical knowledge = pedagogical content knowledge, right? And then we jam technology into that, too -- technological pedagogical content knoweldge! So I am in good company here.

So: anything useful to be done with this idea of technology and fear? If nothing else, just as I get terrified that my knowledge will fail me, I also get terrified that my technology will fail me (hard drive crash, motherboard meltdown, links go dead at a critical moment).