Tag Archives: society

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Press Pause Play

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Press Pause Play is a feature-length documentary that is part inspiring, part demoralising and all stunning. Using a patchwork narrative, it explores the constantly evolving landscape of digitally-empowered creativity. A lot of amazing new work is set against the views of industry veterans, who spend a lot of time bemoaning the demise of creativity as the domain of the cultural elite. A typical tale of freedom and choice pitched against the profitable machine. The juxtaposition of hope and inspiration played against maintaining the status quo, was extremely powerful. In my opinion, creating, as an active endeavor, is generally more fulfilling than consuming, and I see nothing wrong with a world full of individuals and groups creating in earnest. In the end, the best talent will still rise to the top, as there will always be plenty of consumers with an ear and eye for what is great. After all, being a producer does not prevent me from consuming: rather, I think it makes me a more thoughtful, engaged consumer.

Thanks to David Dworsky and Victor Köhler for producing such an entertaining and thought-provoking piece which will hopefully lead to a lot of interesting conversations within education.

Lessons & Units, My Resources

High Tech Stuff

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I just put the finishing touches on a new ICT unit looking into the past, present and future of ICT, and how technology made us the species we are today. My aim is to get students away from the idea that high-tech is the only tech. Technology is everywhere in our lives, and we only live the way we do because of it. In short, without technology we would most likely be just another species of primate.

All the files need to run the unit are listed below. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or just want to have a chat.

Student Work

The way I run this unit allows students to use any number of tools to present their final answer to the four guiding questions. Whilst many students opt for a simple word processor or presentation application, others are more adventurous. In the past students have used tools as diverse as Tiki-Toki, EdCanvas, Storify and Prezi. The work below is a very strong piece of work submitted by one of my students, Adrien. What makes this work stand out is the excellent understanding Adrien shows for the big picture concepts covered in class, and his feeling for the effect of technology upon us. My feedback for improvements was for Adrien to include his sources and a Creative Commons license, and also to proof-read for minor errors.

Creidts: Thanks to marfis75 on Flickr for the thumbnail.

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Networked Society ‘On the Brink’

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Ericsson, having been partly consumed by Sony, are no longer the mobile handset powerhouse they once were. However, they are still a force within other areas of the telecommunications industry, and as the video below shows, seem to have developed a powerful understanding of what high technology is doing to us as a species:

As inherently narcissistic creatures, we often believe that we are the summit of human evolution and achievement. Obsessed as we are with our sparkly mobile devices and lightening fast communications networks, we often simply fail to consider where the future might be taking us. This video provides the refreshing perspective that we are merely at a single point in a long journey, and as far as ICT goes, that journey has only just begun. In particular I found meaning in the suggestion that whilst we have all this technology, really we are only just learning what we can do with it and what it might do to us. I find many of my students, having grown up with ubiquitous computing power, simply have no idea that they are in the midst of a serious upheaval in the way that we live, work and play. At the same time, most teachers and parents have no idea either, simply because they are not equipped with a big picture view of technology. Just as with previous revolutions, be they industrial or political, we have unleashed an unstoppable force that is going to drag us kicking and screaming into a brave new world.

On a final note, comparing the video above with the one below (from a younger Ericsson) provides an interesting porthole into change over a short period of time. We see evolution in action, not only in the thinking at Ericson but also in our collective ability to comprehend and articulate what is happening to us.

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Dalit Manual Scavengers

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer… (listen at 47 min 13 sec)

At the risk of sounding like an old fogey complaining about the “youth of today”, I often get the feeling that my students have no idea just how lucky they have it. That said, I too am generally blithely aware of just how easy I myself have it.

Having listened to this interview, I cannot help but contrast my own life circumstances with that of India’s Dalit population: those born into the untouchable caste, destined to a lifetime of hardship and discrimination. The interviewer talks with a Dalit lady named Lakshmi, who makes her living by emptying human waste from non-flushing toilets. In the course of her day’s work, which fits under the heading of “manual scavenging”, she is regularly covered in excrement, and as a result faces terrible discrimination. As one example, she is not allowed to touch food at the markets, and when she wishes to purchase something she is made to pick it up from the floor, well away from the other customers. The sadness with which she tells her tale drives home the vast disparity in the way in which our world’s riches are distributed.

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What $8499 Bought in 1989

http://www.stephenbailey.com/technology/what-8499…

Most people know that the price of computer technology is falling. However, many people do not fully understand the scope of this change. This article shows a top-of-the-line PC from 1989, priced at USD $8,499. Working from this article, students can be asked to consider many questions including “Why are prices dropping?”, “What are the social, environmental and business implications of these changes?”, “Why have the price of, say, cars, not dropped to the same extent”.

Another possible avenue for discussion is the fact that USD $8,499 was worth significantly more in 1989 than it is now (depending on the calculation method used, it is worth between USD $14,700 and $22,100 in today’s money).

Amusingly, the price includes neither the monitor, nor the mouse, making it quite unusable.

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One of the first news reports about this thing called “Internet”

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http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2010/04/17/news…

This extremely dated video clip introduces video to a new craze sweeping the world: Internet. When you need something to remind students that there was life before the Net, this is the resource to use. It also provides a view of the Internet as it used to be: text only, giving students a path to understanding how technologies adapt and evolve over time. Students can be asked to consider how dependent they are on particular technologies, and how there school and home lives might be different if the Internet did not exist. How would these changes translate into the working world? What are the effects of the Internet on today’s globally connected economy?

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No Impact Man

http://noimpactman.typepad.com/

Colin Beavan (a.k.a No Impact Man) dedicated a year of his life to trying to reduce his environmental impact to zero. He stopped taking taxis, trains and elevators, only ate food grown within 250 miles of his home, left the power grid, stopped buying anything new and stopped making trash.

His inspiring book and blog follow his adventures, and attempt to distill from them a way for humanity to move forward without destroying the environment. No Impact Man’s approach is interesting as it focuses both inward and outward, calling into question the materialistic, wasteful and inefficient way we live our lives. He questions why we work so hard to buy things, when surely spending time with out friends and family will in fact bring us more happiness. This book is crammed full of interesting and surprising facts and figures, but is approachable enough to make a introduction to serious environmental issues.

Thoughts

Thoughts on Being Human

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When I was younger I operated to what I held as a strict, innate moral code. I believed I was, by my very nature, a good person. As time has passed I have behaved in different ways, learned new things and been exposed to many more people. This has caused me to realise the fallacy of my earlier beliefs. It seems to me now, that humans are, without passing judgement on any individual, simply base animals. What appears to set us aside from other animals is our development of complex culture, language and society. Obviously this is due to biological differences, but as DNA has shown this represents a relatively small difference. The way I see it now is that our biological differences have, over time, tiny step by tiny step, allowed us to build up a facade of non-animal behaviour. This behaviour is passed from generation to generation, and as such allows us to maintain a continuous history of relatively steady behaviour. Over time we have come to see this behaviour as being innate: something that makes us different (superior) to other species. Cases of humans “raised by animals” show us clearly that a single generation, removed from our societal constructs, reverts with alarming speed to “primitive” state.

If this belief is accurate, then, the most important question we can ask is what are the mechanisms through which society is reproduced from one generation to the next? I would propose that the traditional answers of family and school are at the centre of this issue. Over the last 100 years I would also imagine, certainly in Western Europe and North America, that mass media has largely displaced the Church as a means for social reproduction.

As both a parent and a teacher-to-be, this line of reasoning has really made me pull up and think for a minute. How can I play my part in this continuum of human behaviour? Which aspects do I wish to propagate and which do I wish to subdue? The answers to these questions might have to wait for another time…