(Turns out that Blogspot limits About Me entries to 1200 characters. Ha!)My dear friend Ruth calls me a Luddite, but it's not, strictly speaking, accurate.
The Luddites , as everyone knows, were skilled textile artisans of the 1810s hailing from Nottingham (a town already famous for its other great critic of the existing economic order, Robin Hood). Faced with emergent technology that they feared threatened their livelihood, the Luddites took matters into their own hands. Literally. Armed with crowbars and hand axes, they lay waste to the offending machine-driven looms, thereby striking dread into the souls of factory owners across England and beyond. Needless to say, the inexorable logic of the Industrial Revolution ultimately prevailed, and the Luddites morphed from a Greenpeace precursor to a historical footnote.
But the term itself has endured, and the very fact that it has suggests that the story still has relevance in today's very different world. Ambivalence about technology persists. The extent to which the indisputable benefits are tempered by the risks and costs, which often take longer to be recognized but which always are there, remains a real issue even today.
I certainly share that ambivalence, and while Ruth mocks me for it, I do take comfort knowing that I am among the august company of both Lord Byron and Thomas Pynchon. I first met Ruth back in an earlier millennium, when we both worked at a Fortune 100 company that prided itself on its cutting-edge technologies. It turned out to be a somewhat uneasy fit for me, there. It is true that I was probably the last employee in the entire corporation to activate my email. It is true that to this day I have neither call-waiting nor cable TV in my house. It is true that I firmly believe that the invention of the Blackberry was a Great Step Backward in the History of Mankind.
But I don't want to destroy the machines. Just to keep 'em in their place: subordinate to, and supporting, the Things That Matter. Technology is supposed to serve us. All of my many objections to Blackberries can be summarized thusly: who's master over whom?
The education of children is surely at the very top of the list of Things That Matter. Therefore, I truly look forward to this course. I can tell, already, both that I will learn a great deal, and also have a great deal of fun. I can also tell, just from my response to the first week's readings, that I will likely keep coming back to a short list of related themes: what are the ends vs. the means; how can technology support the ends rather than be viewed as an end in itself; how can technology support content areas differently from skills acquisition and motivational issues. Those questions will, I believe, be the lenses through which I experience much of the content of the course, and serve as unifying threads of my reading responses and decisions about other coursework. And that's fine.
A final reflection from Robert Calvert (Freq, 1984):
They said Ned Ludd was an idiot boy
That all he could do was wreck and destroy
He turned to his workmates and said: Death to Machines!
They tread on our future and stamp on our dreams!
(The Nottingham weavers and lacemakers really were displaced by the machines, by the way. And the Industrial Revolution that the Luddites attempted to hold back really did let loose a Pandora's Box of abusive child labor, pollution, landscape desecration, and global warming. Always, there are losers as well as winners; always, there are costs as well as benefits.)
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