One of you asked me how I can write so much. The answer is I read a lot. Things like this little epistle from Chris Lott:
Ruminate ยป Normative Futures
As much as we like to consider the influence of technology on our stories, fictions and narratives, it is a fascinating thought exercise to think about how some of those fictional and cinematic narratives have come to influence, positively and negatively, our conception of the technological future. Sadly, we get only the tiniest glimpses inside mental wonderland of individuals.
Blogging is not writing a diary. It’s writing to find out what you think about what other people are saying. There’s a reason it’s called the “read-write web.”
In last night’s chat we talked a lot about this video:
We need to consider these figures as we’re considering what effect the web has on our social structure:
The bars are to scale. Notice the relative size of the whole of the US is a small fraction of China and India, and more importantly, the internet. If the internet were a country, it would be the third largest. What does that mean for our ability to connect to the rest of the world? And what does it mean when the US is about 20th in broadband availability and adoption?
The bars are to scale. Notice that the largest real city here is Mumbai, India. This graph is already out of date. As I’m posting this, the current population of MySpace is 198million. What does it mean for education that 85 million people in the world are blogging and almost none of them are teachers? What does it mean for education that almost 200million people have MySpace accounts that the school can’t access because of filters and “protection” but the kids can because they can do it from home?
We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of this.
One of the recurring themes in Distance Education is why do we feel distant. One of the theoretical foundations of that perception is Moore’s Theory of Distance Transaction, but until we get to that in the course, consider this article that I wrote last year:
Welcome to Day Two. Some of you are still struggling to make sense of it. Please read Eating the Elephant for a little background on what the various tools are for.
For those new to the world of RSS aggregation, I find this video is very helpful:
Thank you. This course has been quite a ride for all of us. My goal was to challenge you to re-examine your preconceived ideas and notions about distance education. My approach was to show you a mode of distance ed that you had never really experienced before. From the first week’s flood of new technologies — and even before with my emails to you before the course even began — you were being asked to do things that were foreign to your experience. Those things were intended to get you to think about the subject of distance delivery. We started “close in” by focusing on specific tools — the tools you’d be using in the course, and then widening out to tools that you might consider in your own courses that didn’t necessarily fit within the framework I was constructing. We kept stepping back and stepping back to get an ever-widening perspective on the field and on your relationship to it. Finally, your capstone projects gave you insight into what you’d learned in a way that writing a research paper would never be able to do. There’s nothing like implementation to show you where your understanding differs from reality, which many of you discovered as you tried to implement complex and complicated technologies.
For it to work, you had to trust me, and you did. For that, I thank you.
As you leave this course, remember that your blogs, your aggregators, and your minds continue to be in your control. Even though the Blackboard shell will close soon, the tools and techniques you’ve developed over the last 4 months will be available to you as long as you want to use them. The changes in the ways you think about education, teaching, and learning will color your own practice in what I hope is a positive manner. While many of you will never teach online in your careers, the ideas engendered here may be useful in your classrooms as well because — regardless of delivery — all education is at a distance.
Please feel free to keep me in your IM list if you’re so inclined and I’m always happy to hear from my past students. My writings will continue, albeit not every day, on my other blog — Cognitive Dissonance — and if you want to keep up with what I’m thinking, you should add that blog to your ‘gators.
Good luck and best wishes in your chosen dreams.
The conference hotel is small and cozy. The staff has been very helpful and I’ve enjoyed my few minutes of peace when I can step out of the hot meeting rooms and out into the cool, clear mountain air.
This didn’t come out all that well. Perhaps I can get some better snaps tomorrow. The construction that’s going on here is amazing!
