Technologies, Reading and Writing

This week has been very hectic, working in the final assignment , the artifact, and reading the last material.
What called my attention the most this week was the article Is Google Making Us Stupid ? by Nicolas Carr. What the internet is making to our brains is something that we often ask ourselves, but we are rarely able to answer.
Our attention span is getting shorter everyday as we live more and more  immersed in the new technologies, that is fact. I can see it in myself,and I definitely witness that in my colleagues and students. The idea that we skim through different websites and platforms seems quite right.
What worries me and I agree with the author in this point, is that we are losing the ability of deep reading. We are not able to keep our attention in long heavy texts. The author states that we might be reading more than in the past by updating statuses, twitting, searching for information, texting, etc, but the content of the texts we read are generally light, compared with the classic literature or any literature people used to read before technology was massively available.

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Of course, a lot of people want to read books will still read them, either the paper version or the Kindle type.

What I can say for certain, is that my country Chile, has very shocking low rates of reading comprehension, which can be explained by the use of the technologies or any other fact.  I have always heard my teachers saying that you needed to read to be able to write. Reading is a passive ability, and writing is an active one, one in which you are supposed to produce. Thus, the quality of what we read will influence how we write. Therefore, if we are reading a lot of information ,and we are not able to choose what to read online , as Carr suggests, then we are reading a lot garbage ! 

Take for instance the popularity of the http://knowyourmeme.com/ ,http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/lolcats, http://failblog.cheezburger.com/, http://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/,  http://www.engrish.com/, Your Grammar Sucks, just to mention some of the most popular sites online

that show a great variety of spelling mistakes and simple bad English, because that is the way people write on the internet. The amount of acronyms and abbreviations been used online and for sms and chat are  far beyond my knowledge  !. As these is what my students are using and watching, I use them for educational purposes .

The modification in the cognitive process that the use of new technologies produce, is also seen in the famous Bloom's Taxonomy, known worldwide for educators . This classification had to be updated to meet the new teaching paradigm. According to Bloom , the cognitive based domain consists on six levels. This was reformulated not only by changing the nouns into verbs, but also by changing the arrangement of the categories. In the past it used to go from the simplest to the most difficult or from the lower to the higher level thinking, placing knowledge in the base of pyramid and application on top. Now, it looks as it follows :

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What are we educators called to do ? ...
Change  ! Change the way we teach, change the way we plan ,and the way we see our students and the teaching learning process.
 If we believe that Google IS REALLY making us stupid, then let's do something to change that , or use the technologies to our advantage. Make use of  the skimming and scanning reading techniques that our students are already using to navigate online, to read essays, articles, books, so they improve the reading comprehension abilities, etc .
Now, there is no excuse not to read, because we have reading material all over the" walls"( literally ) , what we need to develop is the ability to choose what is worth  deep reading  and discuss, and what is worth reading and correct !

Some food for the thought ....

Trans-human ..Human, What Will You Become ?

This week content and topics are very appealing to me. Talking about  Trans-humanism is something that is almost opposite to my vision and mission of life. Trans-humanism refers to the movement that is in favour of the development of new technologies to enhance human life. In my opinion, to enhance/ improve by means that are not natural , is something that I find, to say the least, questionable.

The idea of overcome human limitations such as lifespan, body functionality, cognitive capacity, etc. acting like a sort of "God" over human nature, can have several implications, and instead of altering and going beyond evolution as it is known, seems a very selfish act to be performed by humans. As seen in True Skin.

Likewise Trans-humanism, I believe that human beings are " work in progress", but that progress must be done not in the physical or material sense, but in the inner-self. I find it arguable to talk about  "redefining the human", when humans have not still define themselves. Have you ever wondered, who you really are ? Why are you here ? What are you called to be ? . This is not a religious post, those are really the questions that I have been trying to answer over the years. The real enhancement is what I called " transcendent ", when you transcend as a human being, you do it from the inside out, knowing the role you are playing in this planet and living in harmony with it.

Have you ever read John Livingston Seagull ? I have, and that book made me realised I wasn't that crazy at all, I just was not part of the flock, the people that lives just to eat and work, I wanted to make a difference, just like Jonathan, flying higher and reaching my full potential . I don't need technology to do that for me, I just need to have the passion , which is what makes you do things, and be free.

Maybe that was the reason why I was not impressed by Robbie  and you may hate me for that . Most of  the edcmooc classmates were very moved by the story of this robot, they found it so human like , but I didn't .Robbie had no memories, they were generated and they seem to be a mirage. The essence of human relationship is something that I was debating in the Forums as well, the robot refers to its colleagues as friends, for me that's work, Robbie had a job, but not a real personal life, or what I consider to be one. In this point, after reading some comments , I saw how cultural differences  determine the way you see life, and its components. In my country, most people works to live, but they do not live to work, therefore we don't give it the same importance. I can spend 12 hours at work, and sometimes I do, share with my co-workers all day, but still they are only acquaintances. My friends on the other side are few, but the connection is much stronger, they are the ones that wait for me when I come home, to hang out over the weekend,etc... the ones who care " if  I go to space and never come back " . This film reminded me a lot to Bicentennial Man, and don't get me started with the Oedipus complex we have discussed in the Forums, and platforms with some of the participants.

Gumdrop on the other hand, was my favorite movie this week. This is a very Utopian vision of a very integrated robot into society. She was cheerful, the inflections of the voice ( something very important for me as a teacher trainee ) showed real emotions and feelings, there was also a lot of body language. The fact that the robot was a "she"  , seems to have caused some debate, robots are supposed to be neutral in gender. In my opinion gender is part of our identity, and if the creators wanted it to look more human, by giving the robot a gender, you give it part of the identity. We all have roles to play and those roles defines us, therefore for me gender is important.

To sum up, this week films and contents have been very interesting and controversial to me. I agree to the use of technologies to some extent, but I do not validate the abuse of it, especially when it threatens humanity as we know it. I still have faith in humankind.

Some food for the thought ...

#EDCMOOC Week 2 : Second Hangout Reflections

This week has been all about being human, or non being human in #edcmooc. Well , reasserting the human.

To start with, I will try to answer a question about Professor Fuller's Lecture on Humanity .

Q1 : Why does Professor Fuller say (almost as a joke) that education is ‘a dying art’?
When Professor Fuller refers about education as a " dying art " is when he compares it with the Paideia in old Greek or the paedeuctics . When we talk about this term in education is to refer to the act of pedagogy, sort of upbringing of ideal citizens; meaning education is not only teaching new contents , information but also teaching values and attitudes; to form individuals intellectually, morally and physically prepared to interact in a society, be members of a society, contribute to the society.  

 In terms of education, some of us are still using this approach, but definitely other factors are taking the lead. If we discuss the MOOC experience from that point of view, I would say that as we have seen, e-learning is using tools which keep some " real human" interaction to make it meaningful to the student, one of this ways is by using video in their lectures. EDCMOOC is doing it, actually today we had our second hangout.


Well, when I was watching I was wondering about what was missing to be 100% engaged, because I have to admit that despite the fact I was paying attention, I found myself checking FB's updates, and reading my e-mail, as they were only acting as " talking heads" , I didn't have to keep looking at all times.  Well, I guess it was that,something else needs to be added to the video, charts,  like when they were showing the stats of the survey :
 


 , something else more than the Professor's " talking heads". We have a program where I work, all Professors that are not teachers by profession, they have to take this Pedagogy for Higher Education, where the curriculum is focused on giving them the basics on pedagogy such as , how to teach, how to evaluate, how to plan, and how to communicate. I know that we are discussing here online teaching, but I think we should keep that mind, especially when it comes to " communication " , because here is when we have to make the difference : are we really reaching our audience ? Remember that " language " and its forms of expressions are varied, and here it comes the use of the new technologies, we have to make it effective, creative to grasp student's attention. We, teachers can not become unnecessary, we must be present, guiding, giving feedback , reassuring, showing the students the different choices and make them to decide.


Therefore , the challenge of education in the future and currently I would say , is to reach our students, know them, know their reality, plan according to that, and when we do, keep in mind the type of methodology we are going to use, keep education " human" .

Here is a link to my Flick assignment in case you'd like to see it, comment and eventually fav if you like it :
Flickr assignment