Thursday 21 November 2013

Brief notes on Daniel Chandler's "Technological or Media Determinism" #edcmooc

What debates have become formative for the field of online education? What is their relationship to popular digital culture? What light do they through on the current and future state of digital education? Is technology just a tool or is it a driving force of social and historical changes? 

The answer to each of those questions depends on a theoretical stance on the relationship between technology and society a commentator would adopt, and technological or media determinism is one of the theories with a number of associated features. Have a look at my Prezi notes on some of those!


Danile Chandler explores the main theoretical concepts in his web essay "Technological or Media Determinism" (available from http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/tecdet/tecdet.html).

I must confess, it was not an easy task to take in all the concepts with their numerous features, pros and cons. I am also not quite sure what particular perspective I personally would embrace. On one hand, I actively use modern technologies, including those associated with digital education both in class and online, and sincerely believe that they serve personal and social development; on the other hand, after considering various perspectives, I am not confident whether I use the technologies as a tool or whether existing technology affects my view on what is necessary for education and development in modern society. I am also hesitant about ethically neutral nature of technology: even though I want to believe that the defining factor is our choice of the ways in which to use technology, there are rather persuasive argumets regarding its destructive effect. I dare to hope that further discussion of the matters during the EDC MOOC will help me favour sertain stances over others.

Meanwhile, I compiled brief notes on the main theoretical concepts so that it would be easier to recall each one whenever needed for discussion during the course and after. I thought Prezi was a great tool for saving and sharing my notes, just in case they would come in handy for someone else.



Behind the scene:
This is my second Prezi, and I keep enjoying it a lot! Even though it took me quite a long time to put this "prezintation" together (at the vary final stage I managed to delete 6 (!) frames and had to do them from the scratch), it got produced ways faster than the previous one and I really liked playing with the tool. I think there must be a number of handy ways to use ot for educational reasons, will have to explore that later.

The images for the presentation (and the post thumbnail) were created on ReciteThis.com - it only takes seconds to "turn your quote into a masterpiece" and share it on the web. I like the tool a lot!

Now, in the light of the matters discussed above, was I better to choose spending time outdoors over  clinging tightly to my PC? Well... guilty... This time I would blame horrible weather (excluding enjoyable walks) and my child making a school trip to the theatre (excluding family quality time). What will be the excuse next time?.. ;)

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