Film 1: A Day Made of Glass (5:58) Watch on YouTube
These are two video advertisements - one from Corning, and
one from Intel - setting out these companies’ visions of how their products
will evolve and be used in the future. In both cases, the companies position
their information technologies as completely integrated with daily life and
education.
Questions you might try to answer in the discussion boards, on Twitter, or in the form of an image are:
how is education being visualised here? what is being learned and taught? what is the nature of communication in these future worlds? are these utopian or a dystopian visions to you? In what way(s)?
how is education being visualised here? what is being learned and taught? what is the nature of communication in these future worlds? are these utopian or a dystopian visions to you? In what way(s)?
Film 3: A Digital Tomorrow (9:36) Watch on Vimeo
This is a video-based 'design fiction' created as part of a research project about gesture and digital rituals. It is a playful, ironic reframing of
the sorts of narratives you saw in the Corning and Intel videos - here, future
technology is portrayed as just as frustrating, mundane and absorbing as its
present day counterpart. What do you think the creators of this video are
trying to say about our digital futures?
Sight explores how the ubiquity of data and the increasingly
blurry line between the digital and the material might play out in the sphere
of human relationships. The focus on the emerging social and educational use of
game-based ‘badging’ is particularly interesting. What is going on here, and
how do you interpret the ending? How does this vision align and contrast with
the ones in the first two films?
My Posting Response: https://class.coursera.org/edc-002/forum/thread?thread_id=162&sort=newest
I’d like to
extend the points you make about gamification, recognition, status and organic
interactions…
The Corning and Intel films
depict utopian lifestyles where children – clearly from affluent
circumstances – possess technologies that allow for rich, exploratory learning
through interactive simulations and authentic problem-based projects. Teaching
in this context looks like a dream come true – such eager, attentive, engaged
students and no accommodations to be made for social problems, special needs,
or those other realities that most schools face today.
'A Digital Tomorrow' pokes fun at
technology's imperfections as it drifts into that area where organic
human-to-human interactions are starting to become secondary to the devices –
the mind syncing apparatus at the end suggesting that humans need technology to
be able to codify or validate their capacity to think.
'Sight' pushes the
dystopic envelope to where gamification and status are the primary motivators,
and biologically implanted digital media, in essence an elevated sixth sense,
determine the meaning of life. This constant companion serves to alienate the
individual from those organic interactions – human-to-human and human-to-nature
– to the extent that the individual might just as well be living in a barren
prison cell.
I have always
been an advocate for technology in education based on the belief that it has
the capacity to help connect humans, build community, and support knowledge
development. This last film, however, made me fearful of a future where humans
are no longer human, but rather inseparable from technologies that take
advantage of our innate proclivity for play and exploration. We already see the
seductive power of gaming and other media in society. I am starting to question
what their role should be in the classroom and whether I might be contributing to a future dystopic
society.
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