Scott and Brad reflect on week 5 of Disruptive Tech. “The medium is the message” has become a modern day aphorism, but what does it really mean? Something that seems simple became much more complicated upon further inspection in class.
Week 5: 2/10/2015
Is The Medium The Massage?
- “The young today live mythically and in depth. But they encounter instruction in situations organized by means of classified information—subjects are unrelated, they are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. Many of our institutions suppress all the natural direct experience of youth, who respond with untaught delight to the poetry and the beauty of the new technological environment, the environment of popular culture. It could be their door to all past achievement if studied as an active (and not necessarily benign) force.” (p. 100, McLuhan).
- The Machine Is Us/ing Us
Break
Visual Telephone
Group Work On Synthesis Projects
Show Notes:
Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace Review (Part 1)
For Next Week:
Synthesis Project Due Next Week. No Reading or Blog Posting required this week.
The Anxiety Box
I was catching up with my listening of the “Reply All” podcast and I came across this episode featuring Paul Ford, the author of “The Web Is A Customer Service Medium” which we read earlier in class. I found it interesting to consider the ideas in “Voices In Your Head” while listening to how Ford used the web to deal with his anxiety .
Disruptive Tech Review #3
Once again Brad, Scott, and Mike sit down to reflect on what is happening with the course. We give a shout out to our listener, Cole, and talk about the comments he has left on the blog, talk about the social technology experimentations kicked off in the last class, and we give a preview of some things to come later in the semester.
Week 4: 2/3/2015 (Identity)
In Class:
- Act I
- Act II
- Wenger’s video explanation of the term “situated learning”
- Identity Discussion
- “Every practice is in some sense a form of knowledge, and knowing is participating in that practice” (p. 141).
- “Imagine a child in school, whose identity is being shaped, perhaps at this point, more by external forces than internal.”
- “Multimembership and the work of reconciliation are at the core of being a person, of belonging.” [and learning?]
- “It is easy to see part of one’s identity coming from the experience from community memberships, their learning trajectory, and their relationships with other grad students out in the world; but this takes the act of creating an identity out of the individual’s hands. “
- “Through these local actions and interactions, learning reproduces and transforms the social structure in which it takes place. [Learning] is the vehicle for the evolution of practices and the inclusion of newcomers while also the vehicle for the development and transformation of identities.” (p 13).
- “The more we create multi-memberships in the constellation of communities of practice, we morph our identities; both in the way we identify and the way others identify us.”
- “Indeed, engagement transforms communities, practices, persons, and artifacts through each other. In this regard, engagement is an interesting dimension of power: it affords the power to negotiate our enterprises and thus to shape the context in which we can construct and experience an identity of competence (p. 175).”
- Act III
- Introduce Synthesis Project:
- Create an experience to convey your team’s shared understanding of learning. Include the ideas of community, identity, design, technology, and knowing discussed throughout the class thus far. Your experience can include any kind of media/materials. digital, physical, static, interactive.
- We will give you that following temporal resources for your experience:
- 30 minutes in class on Feb 17th. (Two weeks from today)
- If there is something you want class to look at before the synthesis class, You will be able to post items for the blog before 5:00pm on Sunday, Feb 15th.
- You must post an artifact of your synthesis to the course blog.
- Work in group on Synthesis Project
- Introduce Synthesis Project:
Assignments/Readings due before next class:
- Readings (related to Design):
- Ch. 9 to Coda 2 (pgs. 188-221) in “Communities of Practice” by Wenger
- “The First Tradition” (pgs. 11-23) in “The Design Way”
- “Medium is the Massage” by Marshall McCluhan & Quentin Fiore (available on Yammer)
- Team blog post / comments with a focus on Design by 2/8 @ 5pm
- Comment on other groups’ Blog Posts by 2/10 @ 12pm
Disruptive Tech Review #2
Scott, Mike, and Brad gather around the microphone to reflect on the third disruptive tech class including how Paul Ford’s “The Web Is a Customer Service Medium” can play out on a University campus and how past and present sections of Disruptive Tech have tackled the issues of using technology as social glue.
Week 3: 1/27/2015 (Community)
- Is this course a community of practice?
- Wenger’s three dimensions of a CoP are mutual engagement, a joint enterprise, and a shared repertoire. Where does this course represent these three dimensions?
- what is the relationship between participation in a CoP and learning?
- How do the various media used in this course shape your participation?
- Internet Technology and CoP
- generate a list of disruptive technologies
- how do we unpack their relationship to communities of practice? To what degree are these technologies communities of practice or simply a medium for supporting CoP? Generate arguments for both.
Assignments/Readings due before next class:
- Readings/Media (related to Identity):
- Ch. 5 to Ch. 8 (pgs. 122-187) in “Communities of Practice” by Wenger
- Listen to Radiolab: Voices in your Head
- Team blog post / comments with a focus on Identity by 2/1 @ 5pm
- Comment on other groups’ Blog Posts by 2/3 @ 12pm
- Bring a suggestion for technology for entire class to adopt in order to foster community.
Disruptive Tech Review
Scott, Mike, and I were talking after class yesterday and we decided to record some it to share with you all. Unfortunately Mike had to leave before we started the rolling, so you’ll have to settle for just Scott and I talking about how Christensen’s “Disrupting College” dovetails with For Profit Online University.
Week 2: 1/20/2015
- Technology Trivia
- Let’s be reflective about the technologies that are the chalkboards of our time, discuss (and write a post) the attributes of technology.
- Discussion of the readings and activities based on your blog posts. What are the assumptions left unexamined here and to what degree are they drawing on a theoretical orientation (other than your own)?
- We need to embrace some of these technologies and work towards synchronicity between quality and cost effective educations and stop leaving our economically disadvantaged citizens out of higher education, or saddling American youth with debt they will never balance out with meager entry level pay. (The Disruptors)Focusing on competency-based learning with actionable assessment results in testing-centered learning and teacher accountability-centered policies. (Group 2)
In order to provide education to large scale of people, different platforms and strategies are offered to compete for the market. (Group 4)
Whether it is a resident program, a blended program, or an online one, the expectations of the students will guide their perceived quality level of their education. This once again comes back to the original question of why universities exist and who their target population is. (Learning Avengers)
- We need to embrace some of these technologies and work towards synchronicity between quality and cost effective educations and stop leaving our economically disadvantaged citizens out of higher education, or saddling American youth with debt they will never balance out with meager entry level pay. (The Disruptors)Focusing on competency-based learning with actionable assessment results in testing-centered learning and teacher accountability-centered policies. (Group 2)
- We will kick of the First Cycle of the course. This cycle will deal with the MISSION OF HIGHER ED (Teaching, Learning, Research. Critical Issues: higher education as content providers, knowledge production/creation confined to an activity for the academic elite, and the research dissemination via academic publishers). Your Design Challenge for this thematic cycle is to develop a CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK dealing with these issues taking into account notions of technology, knowledge, learning, identity, community, design that will be due 2/17/2015.
Assignments/Readings due before next class:
- Readings (related to Community):
- Intro 1 to Ch. 4 (pgs. 45-121) in “Communities of Practice” by Wenger
- “The Web Is A Customer Service Medium” by Paul Ford
- Team blog post / comments with a focus on Community by 1/25 @ 5pm
- Comment on other groups’ Blog Posts by 1/27 @ 12pm
Week 1 Class Meeting
The agenda for Week 1:
- Introductions and course background
- Class introductions
- Syllabus review
- “For Profit Online University” (Presentation and Discussion)
- Determine Groups
- Meet some technology: Yammer and Sites at Penn State
- Technology Trivia
Assignments/Readings due before next class:
- Personal Introduction posted to the course blog space
- Register for the TLT Symposium
- Readings:
- Prologue, Vignettes, & Coda 0 (pgs. 3 – 41) in “Communities of Practice” by Wenger (will be available on Yammer)
- Christensen (2011) “Disrupting College” (available on Yammer)
- “Napster, Udacity, And the Academy” by Clay Shirky
- The first weekly writing assignment posted to the blog by 1/18 @ 5pm
- Comment on other groups’ Blog Posts by 1/20 @ 12pm