2/19 Assignment: Mid-Course Reflections

This course has me out of my comfort zone.

I'm a text type at heart, a reader and writer and evaluator of words.  On all the various "learning styles" instruments that I've ever used, I consistently rate as relentlessly (some who know me well might say, "ceaselessly") verbal.  So it's not just the technology itself that is throwing me, but also, more broadly, the emphasis on image-based rather than language-based content.

It's not a bad thing, to be out of my comfort zone.

Nor is it a bad thing, to be confronted (some who know me well might say, "bonked over the head with a baseball bat") with my own learning style and how it informs my own selection, evaluation, and presentation of content.  

As well, I have some pretty deep-rooted ideas about ways in which both image-based content and rapid-fire presentation can cause more harm than good.  This is a long story, and not necessarily appropriate for this venue; but suffice it to say that due to these ideas and the values arising out of them, we do not have cable in our home, nor any sort of video games; nor any beeping handheld devices.  Truly, I am not a Luddite.  But I have purposely designed a life with considerably fewer technology-based interruptions than most modern Americans'; a life that is intentionally language-rich and which intentionally favors literature, art and music that have stood the test of time.

This course hasn't changed that, nor would I expect it to.  What it has done, in a big picture sense, is challenge me to consider whether, and if so how, I might draw lines differently in a classroom than in our home.  

Having read ahead on the syllabus (as my eldest would groan, "just like Hermione,") I have also been challenged to try and sort out how technology "fits in" with my emerging educational philosophy.  Because even though that isn't exactly how the syllabus question is posed, that's the order in which I have to do it: first, articulate an overall educational philosophy; only then consider where and how technology might (I groan myself) "add value."

Finally, at the most obvious level, I have been challenged to learn the technologies covered in class, though with the notable exception of the WEB SITE, this hasn't thus far been as bad as I feared.  I've been particularly thrilled to develop rudimentary blogging skills, so much so that I launched a new one to chronicle our recent family vacation.  It was great fun to do, and my father-in-law, at least, enjoyed reading it.  

I hope, in the remainder of the semester, that I can effect my vision of drawing upon the narratives and art of several different ancient civilizations to complete each of the remaining assignments, so that I end up with a portfolio of stories that I've always loved, brought to new life by technologies I never really considered.

A Little More About Me

(Turns out that Blogspot limits About Me entries to 1200 characters.  Ha!)

"I Am Not a Luddite."

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.)

A Few Firsts....

This is the first time I ever learned how to do hyperlinks.  Oh boy, I do expect I'll have good fun with that....

This is the first picture I ever posted off a website.  It is an illustration of irritated textile workers Smashing the Machine.  I uploaded the image through a website called creativecommons.org 

The putatively original (?!) source of the engraving is 

thegreatgeekmanual.com

I quite proud that I did it.  I'm not quite sure how I did it.

This is a picture I uploaded from my laptop.  It's of my eldest daughter, Guinea Pig 1, acting goofy.

Strictly speaking, I don't count this as as great a personal triumph as the Luddite, above, because I did not put the picture onto my laptop in the first place.  My husband did.  He's always been in charge of that sort of thing.  Every marriage has its division of labor.  In mine, I plan the activities, I book the activities, I take the kids on the activities, I photograph the activities... and my husband, he puts the pictures onto the computer.

Until this course, I guess.