“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.”

Lin Yutang

Technology dependent environments and education

By the end of Unit 5 you will be able to:

• Critically observe the tendencies in growing use of educational technologies and analyse the spectrum of social implications: from (1) providing space, forms and functions for the humans’ creative expressions, collaborations, and organizations, to (2) prompting humans’ reliance on automated reactions, centralized control, and the technology-dependent environments, in which an individual moral choice seems a redundancy;
• Distinguish between the restrictive/prohibitive instructional design solutions and those which are broadening the scope of learning and instructional choices;
• Outline some principles or strategies for securing democratic character of the technology-dependent human environments;
• Formulate and describe (1) which of your skills in designing instruction have been transformed, developed or improved as a result of working with the course material and designing the course projects; (2) which of your initial goals have been transformed, becoming more focused or more broad, or taking a new direction after going through this course.