ETEC540: Text, Technologies Community Weblog

I’m fascinated by the intersection of information, communications, and educational technologies. My undergrad degree is in computer information systems, my post grad is in communications and this term will mark the end of my educational technology masters degree.

Before my educational journey began I worked for a newspaper for 7 years which ended in parallel to massive technological change in the industry. Disruption was rampant as the traditional press and layout began to be replaced by software programs and new hardware technologies. My interest in print has recently been renewed as I just completed a recent consulting stint with Kodak where I delivered a workplace training program to a community of solution architects. These solution architects work with print service providers, including newspapers, as they incorporate new technologies to keep up with the rapid pace of change that is continuing to disrupt the print industry.

I think that this photo from Flikr is a good snapshot over time of some of the artefacts of change and I particularly liked it because it includes a Kodak Photo CD. This reminds me of how recently we had training programs on CDs and how many of these were replaced by online content which are now changing once again to leverage the interactivity available through Web 2.0 technologies and web conferencing.

Control over the technologies, in the form of patents, act as both drivers and constraints to print technology innovations which translates into a significant impact on their use in the educational realm. For example, for every digital camera sold a royalty is paid to Kodak who owns the digital imaging patent. This has led to massive litigation as big companies like Apple and Rim fight against paying and rushing to publish their own imaging patents. Corporate ownership of technology patents impacts cost of printing and accessibility to print, in all forms.

The pace of change is mind numbing as we can now project changing interactive images in front of our students and simultaneously access information stored pretty much anywhere in the world. We can create and publish our own individual text books both digitally and on paper. We can carry around the equivalent of a large library in a small case just big enough for our Ipads and access even more information from anywhere that we can connect into a 3G or 4G network.

Wow. This course should be fascinating and I’m looking forward to connecting digitally with all of you and learning more about the history of text technologies.

Julie Simonsen

Hi all.  My name is Mark Barrett and this is my 9th MET course.  I’m also taking 590 and thus these are my final 3 months (providing I don’t fail!) of completing my masters.  I am a high school teacher in North Vancouver where I also serve as the Athletic Director.  I love to travel and play sports – I just finished my first triathlon this summer!

Of all the courses available this term, I found this course the most compelling because the topic of literacy in all its forms, I believe, is of paramount importance for students and teachers alike.  By understanding the evolution of the spaces in which writing occurs we can then better assist our students in being articulate in multiple literacies.  This is clearly most evident now in digital literacy, but I think its important to also have a historical perspective and appreciation for where written literacy has come prior to this.

The image I chose to share from Flikr (above) depicts type written text from Shakespeares Sonnet 18, “Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day” – perhaps the most famous of all Shakespeare poems.  Shakespeare is renowned as probably the most famous of English playwrights and poets.  What really made the image stand out to me, however, was the image of the fern on the text.  To me it looked like papyrus, most notably used by the Egyptians for writing on, and more simply recalling for me the name of our first discussion forum; “From Papyrus to Cyber Space”.

This is a photo posted by a flickr user of an English website translated into Korean using Google translate. I chose this image because I think the instantaneous translation of texts and languages into other texts and languages constitutes a giant leap in what is already a very fast-paced increase in global communication, and the intricacies of translating text (and speech) from one language to another are particularly interesting to me, as I’m an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher in Seoul, South Korea.

This is my 7th MET course, and I’m excited to be focusing on the interplay between text and technology specifically. I’ve enjoyed every other MET course I’ve taken thus far, and looking forward to embarking on another 3-month educational journey with all of you :)

Hello Everyone! My name is Juliana and ETEC 540 is my 8th course.

I have had a very varied career. I have worked as a research technician in the biotech field and I have also worked as a biosafety associate in the laboratory safety field. I have also completed my Bachelors in Education degree in Secondary Science.

I have recently taken ETEC 565 and through this course I was introduced to Digital Storytelling. In this activity, we were supposed to create a story that also had an educational aspect to it. This was an activity that I thought would be fairly easy to do, but to my surprise I found it to be the most challenging and yet rewarding part of the course. I have written stories and I have created various types of lessons, but I was surprised at how difficult it was for me to merge the two together. I hope to explore this aspect of education in this course and I also look forward to perhaps creating interactive fiction. This is the first time I have heard of the term interactive fiction and I hope to explore it a little bit more.

This is an image of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s typewriter. I always found the story of the effect his new typewriter had on his writing style a good example of the power of the technology to transform our thinking. I didn’t realize that Nietzsche was a technological determinist.

My name is Andrew Jevne. I currently work at a community college in Edmonton. Although my background is in online delivery, I am now a manager of recruitment and student financial aid. This is my ninth MET course and I expect to finish the program in the spring. It’s been a blast.

I can honestly say that this is one of the MET courses I have been most looking forward to taking. I think the analysis of the historical effect of changing communication tools on our thinking processes is fascinating.

I’m looking forward to working with everyone.

Hello Everyone, my name is Angela Novoa and I am writing you from Santiago, Chile. This is my 9th course at the MET program and I am also taking ETEC 522, wishing to finish all my courses on December and graduate next spring.

I chose this image because I am interested on how literacy has changed over the years. Our students communicate and share thoughts, ideas, and emotions in a different way than we do. Also, from my experience as an educator, most of the tools available on the Web, if they are used in education centered on students’ ownership of their learning process, can psomote collaboration, critical thinking skills, creative problem solving, etc.

But some things that I am concerned with this new kind of literacy (the digital one) are the safety of my students on the web, the ethical use of technologies and the ethical way to communicate and share ideas between them and how this can affect the development of an effective communication. Finally, I am interested on learning how the process of shorting terms (by the use of emoticons, for example) is changing our way of thinking, communicating and learning.

Angela.

Greetings,

I’m one of the course instructors, Teresa Dobson. You’ll find my bio on the ETEC 540 course site in the “Prefatory Materials” section.

This image is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. It shows a manuscript held in the Homer Multitext Project digital archives. As we’ll learn in future course readings (Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy), texts like Homer’s Iliad are written versions of oral poems and their origin is reflected in the use of language in the text.

There are a number of interesting features of this manuscript: illumination, marginalia, and so on. As technologies for writing have developed, some features of earlier book forms have been incorporated and others have been dropped. Bolter (2001) calls this process “remediation.” In this course we’ll look at the process of remediation over a number of centuries with a view to contextualizing present shifts in writing technologies historically.

Finally, it is interesting to note that one effect of the rise of digital technologies is that rare manuscripts such as this one are now far more widely accessible to readers than they have been before, and their accessibility through digital means has revived interest in such manuscripts and in book culture generally. The interplay among various technologies for knowledge diffusion is complex and intriguing. I hope you’ll find the next few weeks in which we consider this interplay interesting.

I look forward to viewing your contributions to the ETEC 540 communications spaces in the next weeks!

Cheers,

Teresa

Hi everyone,

My name is Jeff Miller and I am one of your instructors for ETEC540 this term.  You can find some more information about me in the WebCT course site. I wanted to make a posting here, too, to get us all started withe the introduction activity on our Community Weblog.

This picture is about 100 years old and shows a man setting type, likely for the publication of a newspaper. It captures a particular historical relationship with the technology of printing, one that required considerable physical labour and refined skill in those who were typesetters. This image also shows just how much our technologies of writing (printing) have evolved in the last 100 years, to the point now where it is possible to process type, display it on a screen as light, and transmit it around the world using a computer and pulses of data rather than a printing press, paper and dots of ink.

We will have ample opportunities in this course to explore the evolution of technologies of writing and reading. Against the backdrop of social, cultural and technological changes that attend such developments, we will explore how digital spaces for reading and writing both extend and challenge notions of literacy and academic practice. Like the typesetter of old, you will be able to get your hands dirty (well, perhaps your finger-tips), with digital publication tools on our course website, our community weblog and our wiki space.

Enjoy!
Jeff