Self Assessment

Marjorie Thompson

A Brief Introduction

In order to design course material for the 21^st century, it is important to get an idea about the direction society is going, what technology can do. It is important to understand how it can benefit society and the individual. It is also important to understand what negative effects can occur from using technology. The course material and structure of the assignments for the course, New Media and Technology have been very informative in giving a foundation for understanding media and new technology in the 21st century.

Strengths

In order to be able to assess the course materials and the current thought about new technology, one needs to be able to read between the lines. It is essential to be able to understand when a statement in a research paper is a futuristic prediction made by a particular person about the direction he or she thinks the society will go in with the use of technology and when a statement comes from an examination of facts. Comparing futuristic hypothesis to actual facts is a way to assess how technology will really effect people. When reading the paper “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century”, there were many good ideas about how technology can be used and there were some ideas that were unrealistic about how media should be used. Knowing how to evaluate these is a strength. To paraphrase Gail Bush from the YouTube Video “Information Transliteracy in the 21st Century Classroom” in the 21^st Century, “you need to question the answers”(Bush, 2012)

In most of the publications I read for this class, the researchers stressed that education is going through some major changes. Technology is seen as the instant solution to solve all of the problems of slow and inattentive students. However it is important to be able to see beyond the present day hype about technology and understand how elements of technology will affect the future generations.

As the world becomes more complex, it also becomes more confusing. Having a solid framework to understand what these changes mean is also about having an understanding about whether changes will be positive or negative. In order to know whether change will be positive or negative, one has to know how to assess the impact of technology from a few indicators. In order to make these assessments one has to have a clear sense of ethics a moral compass if you will. Once these boundaries are in place, learning can be directed around potential problems. 

While there are positive aspects of technology, people who use technology can become overwhelmed by many factors. It is important to feel that one can control their life the direction of their path and that people will have respect for each other. As children grow into adults they can be overwhelmed by many factors. If their teachers and parents are not aware of the negative effects of technology and peer pressure, individuals can become self-destructive, suicidal.

Improvements

Improvements would consist of getting a better idea about the background and direction of the path of my learners. Having a background in jewelry, art history, I have many ideas about instructional videos to make. The easiest way to determine what sort of videos to make would be to determine where there is a knowledge deficit and work from there. However, it is difficult to know what the knowledge deficit would encompass. One population of learners might have a knowledge deficit of information that another population of learners would be very aware of.

In researching topics, I try to fill knowledge gaps of the area that I am seeking information about. When I made the presentation “The Individual and Collective Intelligence”, I had never read the work of Rousseau. It was interesting to gain a greater understanding of some basic concepts underlying the political history of the public space. I feel that I made progress by looking at 21st century research into the struggles of the individual in conjunction with the group by reading psychological research into subjectivity and individualism.

Insights

Through the readings in this course and the course Learning and Emerging Technologies, I have gotten a greater understanding of current thought about the interface of technology and the individual and the group in the 21st century by looking at such areas as metadata, collective intelligence, media, and popular culture. As an artist, I have never been interested in popular culture. I thought that Andy Warhol and other artists from the 60's and 70's addressed popular culture with Pop Art and this was a subject that had already been done.

However, it is revealing to know where the current thought is on collective intelligence. When I first began reading the research, I was somewhat taken aback that many researchers had very positive opinions about using the internet. These opinions seemed to be biased. It was strange to read researchers proposing in the paper “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century”, that schools use social media in classrooms when there are Federal regulations against it or that students ignore copyright laws or rules of plagiarism and liberally sample creative works. I was relieved later in the semester to listen to the interview in the Google hangout with the Brazilian social anthropologist who spoke about her research into the effects of social media on the "Digital Native" generation of Brazil. In this interview, it was interesting to see that she concluded that all collective activities are not intrinsically good, which corroborated my intuitive feelings about many aspects of social media and the internet.

In the future, I feel that I will be able to use this new knowledge in several ways. Using this foundation to build on, I will be able to structure learning environments that are constructive. Knowing that students have a hard time understanding bias in education, it would be important to stress that students question the source of materials and be true to their intuitive feelings. Working from the ideas of backwards design, I will be able to direct teaching materials towards a desired goal. I feel that there are many ways that education can be enhanced through the use of innovations in technology and look forward to creating fun engaging learning environments.

References:

Gail Bush “Information Transliteracy in the 21st Century Classroom” 2012, National Louis University,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1JjcmGJb2A&feature=youtu.be, January 26, 2012

David Crystal, Language and the Internet, Cambridge University Press, 2004

Henry Jenkins with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison, “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 2009