1. What is it like for you, listening in to this lecture from 30 years ago in this elite educational setting? What kind of “media ecology” does the lecture create? In what ways is the formal lecture an “educational technology”?
The formal lecture as an educational technology can be seen, in simplistic terms, as a channel of knowledge transfer. The interactions take place in a confined space between a speaker and an audience for the purpose of sharing a specific body of knowledge in a more or less one-sided way (the audience remains silent for the most part). The idea of “knowledge” transfer, however, appears to be more complicated when interpreted through the lens of media ecology.
For the audience who were present in the setting thirty years ago, the lecture created a media ecology that was synchronous, allowing for the exchange of bodily interactions on top of the topic of knowledge that was shared. While the nature of a lecture does not create much room for verbal reciprocity between the speaker and listener, the immediacy and distance of physical bodies in a confined space still necessitates certain degrees of social reciprocity to be made. For example, you can tell the instances when Franklin (1989) appears to slow down in her speech as if to gauge the responses of her audience in helping her decide whether or not to elaborate or emphasize a point. This practice of discernment and discretion on the speaker’s part is eliminated in my case of listening to the lecture, thirty years later, in an asynchronous setting, even more, at a different time in history where social and political conventions surrounding the issues Franklin mentioned might have changed. This is turn affects the way I understand and respond to certain statements. Now if Franklin was in front of me to gauge my responses, would she have altered her speech? Would that form of reciprocity made available cause me to gain a different understanding of a point?
Franklin (1990) argues that the use of electronic technologies significantly alters the nature of communications — in the case of this lecture recording, the sound has been separated from its source which then places the emphasis on content and format rather than intent. In an educational setting, this “destructuring by asynchronicity” (Franklin, 1990, p. 168) plays out in significant changes in the learning process, such as how the transfer of values embedded in content that takes place in verbal communication — the immediate exchange of messages between people in the present — is compromised. This degree of compromise illustrates the media ecology that surrounds my asynchronous and decontextualized listening experience.
2. How do Franklin’s categories of “prescriptive” and “holistic” technologies apply to educational technologies?
Franklin (1989) distinguishes holistic and prescriptive technologies as different divisions of labor with corresponding social and political implications — the former focuses on “specialization by product” (akin to the notion of craft where the process of work is controlled by the creator from beginning to end), while the latter focuses on “specialization by process” (such as the industrial division of labor where the worker does not have ownership of the product but only plays a part in the production process). To expand, Franklin (1989) argues that holistic technologies build on a growth model, whereas prescriptive technologies build on a production model. The idea of growth implies something which can be nurtured and promoted, but not commanded; it implies a context through which such results come to be under particular (soil) conditions. Contrasting that is the idea of production which suggests that something that can be arranged, manipulated, externally controlled, even more, carried out independent of context — external variables are used to guarantee the success of a product, often according to the terms of an economic narrative.
The application of a holistic/growth model versus a prescriptive/production model in education holds very important distinctions. When educational technologies are envisioned out of context and created to be used in a way that is stripped from the foundational “soils” of learning, one runs the risk of relegating the educational experience to being a strictly specified “regimen” with the expectation of students being turned into specifiable products. Franklin (1990, p. 40) aptly observes that “the magic moment when teaching turns into learning depends on the human setting and the quality and example of the teacher” — this strongly relates to an environment of growth rather than the rigid, external parameters that are set in a production model. Under such a model, educational technologies are introduced to the field as “productive improvements” detached from context, starkly different from the idea of “soil-nurturing” in a growth model. In this view, in using educational technologies, it is imperative to ask: where and how is this learning taking place, and by whom will the benefits of this technology be reaped?
3. What differences did you see as you switched from listening to skimming to close reading? Were you able to experience the recorded lecture in any ways differently than when reading the text? Listening takes more “real world” time, so where did spending that extra time get you in terms of understanding? What things did you notice?
When listening to the lecture I found myself pausing frequently and replaying certain parts to take notes, or just to ensure that I understood what the speaker was trying to express. In some ways, a casual listening without note-taking is akin to skimming a reading — you get the gist of it but probably won’t remember half of it. A close reading of the text (with highlighting!), on the other hand, serves better to consolidate one’s understanding of a material when main ideas are identified and slowly digested. I am starting to see how over half a decade of online learning has conditioned me to approach study materials and “learn” in a particular way and form. While listening took more “real world” time, it didn’t particularly benefit my understanding of the text. In fact, if not for the additional note-taking, I might have even found listening time to be time wasted. I am now far too used to self-paced learning that the rhythms of a live lecture pose itself as a challenge to my own process of consolidation and understanding.
In a sense, I may have found (or have been conditioned to) a study method that works well to acquire “explicit” learning — the raw acquisition of skill and content — however, the “implicit” learning, the social teaching, “for which the activity of learning together provides the setting” (Franklin, 1990, p. 187), might have grown too foreign for me to appreciate. While I have certainly benefited from the asynchronous, self-paced methods of online learning, I am prompted by Franklin (1990) to consider the personal consequences as well as the social and political implications of time-space dislocations that come as a result of asynchronous modes of doing things. I am now obliged to paraphrase Franklin (1990, p. 189) and ask: “how am I learning discernment, trust and collaboration when I rarely seek to build, learn and create together in the course of a common task?”
References
Franklin, U. (1989). The Real World of Technology: Part 1. Retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1989-cbc-massey-lectures-the-real-world-of-technology-1.2946845
Franklin, U. (1990). The Real World of Technology. Toronto: Anansi Press.