Making Connections

• 10 years ago
• Posted in:Making connections, Participation
• 2
• Author: mary sikkes

ETEC 540 has been an excellent introduction into the UBC MET program for me. I entered into this program in September with far less technology expertise than I thought I had, and very little knowledge of how technology has developed throughout the centuries. I have taken a number of literature courses, but none that explored the development of the actual technology of writing.

I have to admit, coming into the program, I had some serious concerns about what I considered to be the overuse of technology in our everyday lives. I felt that digital technology was leading my students’ lives at home, and was beginning to affect their abilities to focus on reading and writing tasks at school. However, since reading both the materials provided by the course and the posts created by other students in this course, I believe I am beginning to relate to technology differently, which is terrific. As I have only been teaching for twelve years, I have many more years of teaching left, and recognize that I need to develop my understanding of technology, especially digital technology, in order to keep up with what and how my students are learning, and need to learn, to succeed in their futures. Joshua Campbell’s post, “It Takes Me Longer, Because I Read More Carefully – E-Books vs. Print Books” helped to reassure me, with a variety of supporting points, that printed text is not going to disappear any time soon; whereas posts such as Mike Grieve’s “The best of both worlds” reminded me of the importance of online tools such as YouTube help videos that provide us with a visual example we can pause and replay as needed.

This course has opened my eyes to a variety of different tools that I can use in my classroom – in this regard, I found the Rip.Mix.Feed projects incredibly helpful. I found Anita’s “Rip Mix Feed Project: A look at Online Presentation Tools” especially informative as it gave me a number of resources to explore, and I had not heard of many of the presentation tools she reviewed. While I watched, I copied down the tools I thought I would find most applicable to me, and I have already used one for this course that I had never even heard of before Anita’s post.

I also really appreciated Victoria Olson’s post, “The Evolution of Digital Rectangles [Electronic Slides]” which pushed me into looking past the PowerPoint program that I was comfortable with. I was quite happily ‘stuck’ in my technology rut and while I would attempt to branch out, I would ultimately feel overwhelmed and retreat back to what I was comfortable with; which explains why my video presentation was a PowerPoint converted into video form (which was a new task in itself). By reading Victoria’s post and James’s response, I realized I had to move beyond my comfort zone and quickly.

In terms of texts related to this course, I found many very interesting, but there were a few that really stood out and made an impact on me. To begin with, as a person who struggles with creativity, I was amazed by the projections made by Vannevar Bush in 1945 in “As we may think”. The fact that he had the foresight to imagine a camera “…a little larger than a walnut” worn on one’s head, and “(a) library of a million volumes…compressed into one end of a desk” is absolutely incredible. When I think toward the future, I cannot imagine what will be invented in the next twenty years, yet Bush was able to make accurate predictions before technology had advanced enough for his projections to seem attainable to many.

I found reading about the socio-economic divide between developed and less-technologically developed countries interesting as well. I live in a small town of approximately 5,000 people; however, because I live in a developed area of the world, we are very developed as far as technology is concerned. We have numerous stores that sell computers, various cell phone providers, and high-speed internet/Wifi available to those who live within town limits. At the same time, I have students in my class who live in poverty and do not have access to the technologies that I take for granted. Even within our developed countries, significant socio-economic divides in technology have been formed. Michael Wesch’s video “A Vision of Students Today” points out that “Over 1 billion people make less than $1 a day….This laptop costs more than some people in the world make in a year.” Having said that, James Lund’s “Rip Mix Feed Instructables” introduction draws attention to the fact that “With the use of a site like Intructables.com, we can be connected to a diverse community from almost limitless geographic locations.”

I found Jay David Bolter’s, Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. applicable to my life and classroom today as well as being very readable, so it held my interest easily. I enjoyed both Bolter’s writing style and his approach to technologies both past and present. I found Ong much more difficult to read; however, I found Ong’s points about primary and secondary orality very interesting. There were many points, such as the fact that had we not developed the technology of writing, we would not think as we do today, that made me consider how I teach my students, especially those who come from households where reading does not take place. We could not imagine an automobile (if we had never before seen one) as described by another person because we would have no frame of reference to help us create that image in our minds (Ong, 1982). While my students have, of course, all seen cars before, I was reminded of the importance of taking into account the literacy of each of my students, not just in terms of whether or not they can read a text I put before them, but in how they actually interact with our world. Many of Ong’s points made obvious sense once I had read them, but I found that I had never considered some of his points prior to reading Orality and Literacy .

All-in-all, I found this course challenging and informative, but also a little calming as it took some of the fears I had about developing technology away. As Bolter points out, “Writing technologies, in particular electronic writing today, do not determine how we think or how we define ourselves. Rather, they participate in our ongoing cultural redefinitions of self, knowledge, and experience.” (Bolter, 2001)

References:

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Maywah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Retrieved from: http://www.livemargin.com/socialbook/client/reader.html#bookId=53501759e4b091bb4f80d3db&groupId=55df0140e4b0be3444bb928b&mode=group&chunk=3&offset=1

Bush, V. (1945). “As we may think”. The Atlantic Monthly. 176(1), 101-108. Retrieved 9 November, 2015 from: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/

Ong, W.J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen.

Wesch, M. (Producer). (2008). A vision of students today (& what teachers must do) [Online post with video]. Retrieved 21 November, 2015, from: http://blogs.britannica.com/2008/10/a-vision-of-students-today-what-teachers-must-do

Image Reference:
[Untitled image]. Retrieved 2 December, 2015, from: https://fm.mednet.ucla.edu/MakingConnections/sponsors.asp