Gerry Stahl Drexel University Philadelphia USA The theme of engaged learning with emerging
technology is a timely and important one. This book proclaims the global relevance of the topic
and sharpens its focus. I would like to open the book by sketching some of the historical
context and dimensions of application before the chapter authors provide the substance.
Engagement with the world - To be human is to be engaged with other people in the world. Yet
there has been a dominant strain of thought at least in the West that directs attention
primarily to the isolated individual as naked mind. From classical Greece to modern times
engagement in the daily activities of human existence has been denigrated. Plato (340 BC 1941)
banished worldly engagement to a realm of shadows removed from the bright light of ideas and
Descartes (1633 1999) even divorced our minds from our own bodies. It can be suggested that
this is a particularly Western tendency supportive of the emphasis on the individual agent in
Christianity and capitalism. But the view of people as originally unengaged has spread around
the globe to the point where it is now necessary everywhere to take steps to reinstate
engagement through explicit efforts. Perhaps the most systematic effort to rethink the nature
of human being in terms of engagement in the world was Heidegger's (1927 1996). He argued that
human existence takes place through our concern with other people and things that are
meaningful to us.
