Climax: The point of greatest dramatic tension or transition in a theatrical work.  Also the turning point that marks a change, for better or worse, in the protagonist’s journey.

This part of the journey marked some of the most difficult moments for me as a student.  Although I have highlighted some of the experiences, there were many points of this play that had its trials and tribulations, and could have easily turned this comedy into a tragedy.  The climax focuses on the most dramatic points that I experienced in my understanding of educational technology.  These were the experiences that made me question new theories and applications, and contributed to an array of new comprehension in this field.

In ETEC 531: Cultural and New Media Studies, the subjects explored included technocultural issues such as cyborgs and hybridity, digital property, cyberpunk fiction, the posthuman, AI and AEI, information warfare, virtual reality, third nature and religion.  This was a new field of study for me and introduced new philosophies and directions.  The artifact that shows my new understanding in this field is my Thematic Media Production.  The media production responds to one post-test question from the course’s nine modules: The Problems of Accepting Behaviour Emulation as Indicative of Intelligence.  This assignment focused on media design skills and challenged me to experiment with non-print media in cyberspace.  I aimed to inspire dialogue with my classmates and the media world on issues of technology.  This project began a curiosity of how technology is changing the way we think and act as humans.  Despite the positives of technology, we may be forgetting the integral parts that make up a human and a culture.  This media production developed the idea of what would happen if we did in fact accept behaviour emulation as indicative of intelligence; in this case, the machine, or technology, has surpassed our own abilities in areas, but would we call them intelligent?  One of the questions that resulted was the identity of the human versus the identity of the machine.

In 520: Planning and Managing Learning Technologies in Higher Education, the subjects explored included the management, strategies, and system-wide planning of technology-based courses and projects at an institutional, provincial, state, or national levels to support and regulate distributed learning.  This course introduced the understanding of educational technology as a business, which I was not familiar with.  Because of the lack of background knowledge, I found this course difficult to follow, but through the discussions with classmates in the Vista shell and the readings from Bates and Sangra’s Managing Technology in Higher Education: Strategies for Transforming Teaching and Learning (2011).  At the beginning, I did not know the components that were required to implement learning technologies in education, and these components were essential to a successful implementation.  The artifact, Vice-Principal For A Day, represents a collaborative learning opportunity that enabled constructive design of a proposal paper for a high school without boundaries.  In a group of three, we took on the role of Vice-Principal, champion of e-learning, and planned the development of learning technologies in a small-town school in Hope.  The result was an inspiring dialogue on the possibilities of learning technologies for the future of our schools.  Some of the learning included how the planning process was integral to understanding the core values and principles, the vision, and the context of the institution.  These values and principles would remain throughout the project and it was important to maintain  the identity of the institution.  It was also vital to develop a criteria, or rubric, that would be used throughout the planning process.  Elements of the criteria would include the “champions” in the institution, an advanced technological infrastructure, strategic rationale, allocation of resources, innovative use of technology, support and training for instructors and staff, and effective learning and teaching.  As a result, I am more confident in being able to help plan and manage learning technologies in both secondary and higher education settings.