Education, Technology, and Society: Altering Environments

      Before reading Clark’s book and writing the paper, I considered technology and the human body as two things clearly separated. However after reading that even the language we are using is technology, I find a little confusing to define the relationship of human and technology. Instead of simply stating that human invented and is controlling technology, I’m thinking that technology has also become an inseparable part of human and defines what human are.

         I also like the idea that instead of hoping the computers would do everything for us and  worrying about computers defeating human in the future, we should work with computers to solve problems that we are unable to do our own. This reminds me of the program I learned last year in my intro to computer science class. I saw fascinating works designed by human and realized by computer. It is almost impossible to finish such a work only by human or by computer. I think technology is becoming our shoes, helping us to run faster and jump higher.

Writing my first paper (actually writing a traditional"academic paper": printed, double-spaced, 12 pt font) made me remember a whole bunch of questions that came out of a Serendip class that I took last semester. (Literary Kinds) In this post, I lamented about my "lack of media literacy" and how I was so frustrated with not being able to present information multimodally. But then I wrote this paper as my final for that same class where I really interrogated what it meant to be multimodal, and how this affected the genre of the academic paper. What I never did (and what I hope to really question and push throughout the course of this semester) is to link back my assertions in that final paper to my assumptions that I wrote about in that post.

Following our class discussion on Andy Clark's ideas and their application to the classroom, I attended my Religion, Sex, and Power class in which we had just read The Cyborg Manifesto  by Donna Haraway. Weird coincidence, right? Now, in this other class, we were looking at the concept of a cyborg through a feminist lense and discussing the differences between a cyborg and a goddess, as the auther eventually states that she "would rather be a cyborg than a goddess." How is it, we wondered, that a cyborg is a stronger figure to which women should look than the goddess? After debating for quite a while, we eventually concluded that one imporant aspect of the cyborg is that her inner knowledge is fused with the knowledge of the external world as well (I had to mention the "skinbag" concept at this point....). This contrasts with the image of the goddess that comes from within us and "is us." 

Since these two class discussions, I've been trying to think through how some of these contrasts between goddess and cyborg might related to the clasroom. Or do they? One thought I had is that maybe our classrooms should continue to emphasize the activity of reaching outside ourselves and to the larger community to help faciliate our learning and growth. 

Instead of blaming the computer for why technology has taken over our lives, perhaps we should pause and take a moment to figure out how we can change the comupter so that it betters a human's functioning capabilities. In this sense, we should find a way that a comupter can benefit taking up a human's time. For example, I worry that all of this technology is hindering children from learning social interactions face to face so let's just say that the problem is lacking face to face interactions, and don't blame the computer for causing this. Rather, figure out a solution using the human--social interaction on facebook or twitter or blogs might just be changing what social interaction means. People are still communicating, just in a different sense, they don't need to be face to face but they are still sharing their ideas and thoughts. Similarly with what we talked about in class-children aren't learning cursive anymore because they can type. At first that seemed terrible but it seems much more efficient because typing is faster and often, more legible. 

1. possibly consulting less "academic" sources to see how real-life teachers use technology in their classrooms. i.e. tips/how to , blogs

2. talk about teaching, learning, classrooms 

3. more online engagement outside of the classroom? a more of an “insider” approach might prove useful as not everyone is fluent

4. examples of technologies that have successfully been incorporated into the classroom 

5. share experiences of teachers (yours or that you have observed) using technology in the classroom and how it benefits or hinders learning. 

6. continue to think about how and why I use social media 

7. analyze Clark's methods of proof in his texts and to assure me of the validity of his arguments 

8. discuss Clark's main ideas and how they are/can be applied to the classroom

9. Share about specific person we know and how technology access might affect them

10. to possibly teach/discuss the benefits/disadvantages of technology and see how it can add to human life but not control it or take it over 

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to share my experience using Twitter to "microblog" (whatever that means) about my day
last class but I wanted to share something that I think fits in quite nicely with the article that Jen Rajchel tweeted under the
#netloged255 hastag about the use of your real name on Facebook.

I'm not an avid fan of Twitter but I do have two accounts: one that's personal (and protected) and one that projects a more
"professional image". In fact, my best friend (in a tweet no less) commented on the "proper-ness" of my account. It's interesting
to reflect on why I choose to have two accounts. In my personal account, I follow various popular figures and my friends. The
people who follow me mostly know me personally and I consider it as somewhat of a brain dump. Scrolling through my past tweets,
I see my inner thoughts, inside jokes, and a lot of mean comments. (What does this say about me? I don't even wanna...) However,
my more "professional" account has tweets about my academic interests, tweets from another class I took, and the tweets I wrote
for #netloged255.I don't know the people who follow me personally, nor do I really know much about the people who I follow.

Dear Students,

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