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Hi, this is Linda Kropp here, making my video for week 2 of the eLearning and Digital Cultures
MOOC. Last week, I thought I had a grasp on this
whole MOOC thing and then this week I found several new resources which I had never seen
before. I also saw several people on the course who are taking this for the second time, and
I can see why.
So, Week 2 in Review: New for me this week:
I created a Google map for my classmates to pin their name and location on and hopefully
by the end of the class we’ll have at least a thousand points showing where, a sampling
of where everybody in the class is taking the course from.
I signed up for tweetdeck so that I could participate in my first ever tweetchat. That
was an interesting experience. A lot going on with several streams of twitter all on
the same screen. Made it so that I didn’t have to use my phone, my iPad and my laptop
all at once. And then also, I watched the Google Circle,
live and when Dr Sinclair read my tweet about the amazing “community” which is present
in EDCmooc, over the internet, I was touched. So I tweeted: “Wow, my name was mentioned
over the internet from Edinburgh to 22,000+. I’ve come a long way from a little farm
in Oakdale, CA!!” And then she read that tweet as well. So, I was twice touched. I
amazes me how a Massive Open Online Course, with over 22,000 students can be affecting
me so personally. I’ve also learned two new colloquialisms
this week (through twitter, no less). I learned, “Bob’s your uncle!” and, “Put the
butter on the spinach!” Neither of which I had heard before; had to Google them to
see what they meant. So if you don’t know what they mean, you might just want to do
that. So, this week, in our course, we have been
studying metaphors: man, technology and how they shape the future.
The videos this week were interesting. In fact, I found them more interesting than the
first week’s videos. They were about, the first two were about education and how utopian
education can become with technology. Yet even with these perfect representations of
education, I couldn't help but be reminded of such cautionary tales as "Minority Report"
and "Enders Game." It seems like whenever there is a scenario where things are just
perfect, it must always turn into a cautionary tale. I guess that’s what makes it exciting
enough for a movie.
In my November 12 blog post I discussed the similarities between, A Day of Glass, and
the school in the movie, Enders Game. Each was set primarily in educational environments
which had reached academic utopia. Except in Ender’s Game, the students were being
educated to wage war, and ultimately to commit genocide. So, not quite a utopia.
The metaphors in Ender’s Game were quite a few, Ender as savior of the world, and the
brightest youth vying for a spot in the military schools.
But especially profound to me was the scene when the young soldiers are sent out into
battle by the old(er) men who stand safely behind their walls of safety glass and watch
as the young men are gunned down…it reminds me of today’s military.
The third video, I thought, was pretty funny. It reminded me of my life. It looked like
present day because they didn’t have a big budget to make it look futuristic and I don’t
think that what they were portraying is really that far in the future. They had a car, for
example that the door opened by swiping your hand over the glass, it read the fingerprints.
And then it started by looking in the mirror and then facial recognition started the ignition.
And the thing that kept going through my mind was the fact that I usually keep a car forever.
My current vehicle is 12 years old. I’ve had it since it was new, but in the last 12
years, I’m afraid my face has changed significantly, so what happens in a society where this type
of technology has evolved and someone like me keeps their vehicle for 12 years and then
they can’t start their car because they don’t look the same? I guess we’ll have
different issues that we have to face at that time.
The fourth video, I found slightly disturbing. It was about a man and a woman on date and
the man seems to have inside track on anything that happened, you know, when the young woman
was turned off a little bit by the things he said, he could easily bring things around
and regain her interest and then at the end she was ready to leave and done with the whole
thing and he stopped her. He controlled her behavior; she no longer had free will.
Well, for me at that point, she was not real. She obviously was a figment of his imagination
and the movie was about the whole thing happening in his mind. She was like the pictures on
his wall, his BLANK wall, where they were just in his mind and they weren’t actually-
didn’t actually exist. But based on other peoples’ posts, I think
they thought she was real and he was controlling her. So to me, the most interesting part of
that was that each of us brings our own culture and experience to the interpretation of these
videos and this reading material. So, who knows who’s right, but, um, that was kind
of interesting to me—that we could have seen that ending as totally different.
I’m looking forward to week three - Reasserting the human.
To me this sounds like the Terminator movie series –taking earth back from the machines.
I can hardly wait to begin!