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Hi, I'm Sian Bayne, and welcome to the old anatomy lecture
here at the University of Edinburgh.
This is in the old Teviot medical school which was opened in 1884.
And we've got a new state of the art medical school now elsewhere in the city.
But this space retains much of a mysterious glamour of it's past.
There's an anatomy museum here in the building.
And it's famous among other things for holding the skeleton
of William Burke, the notorious Edinburgh murderer and resurrection man.
Medical research and teaching flourished here in Edinburgh in
the early 19th Century, as it still does today.
But at that time, there wasn't a large enough legal supply of dead
bodies to satisfy the demands of all the anatomy students and their teachers.
Now William Burke and his collaborator, William Hare, filled this grim gap in the
market by murdering 16 local people and selling their bodies to the, until then.
Hugely popular Edinburgh
anatomist and teacher, Dr. Robert Knox, for use in his lectures.
Burke was eventually tried and executed, and his body was itself
publicly dissected in what was an extremely well attended anatomy lecture.
It is perhaps a bit of a grim story to be beginning our MOOC with, and certainly
we take far less grotesque approach to the gathering
of resources for our teaching and research these days.
But
I think the story does illustrate something of the history and the power and
symbolic significance of the lecture as a
kind of touchstone for the academic teaching method.
And it's not surprising to see that lecture approach
perpetuated into, into the new mode of teaching the MOOC.
Video lecture is just one example.
As the anatomy lecture theater and museum demonstrate by looking to the past.
We can throw some really interesting light on our current
practices, as teachers, and lecturers, and as educators.
And that's really what this first week of the
MOOC is trying to do by looking back to
some key issues and debates that were discussed in
the literature around the late 1990s and early 21st century.
that was recent history, but still early days for our field.
We're asking you to look at these readings and ideas
within the context of an overarching theme for this week and
for next week Which is that of Utopia's and Dystopia's?
So how did those early discussions within e-learning and digital education mesh with
broader social preoccupations, with the idea of
an ideal future society enabled by technology.
A Utopia versus a nightmarish vision of a
future society, dominated by maligned technologies, a Dystopia.
Upon re-opposition
like utopia and dystopia, however, can only really take us so
far in thinking about the complex social context of digital education.
So this week, we're also offering you a reading from Daniel
Chandler's web essay on technological determining as something to think with.
The idea that technologies like these can still
be seen as the principle factor driving societal change.
It's still really quite
wide spread in discussions within the field of digital education and G learning.
So there are a lot of rich and complex, and varied ideas running through the
course this week in the films that you're
looking at and the readings that you're doing.
and I hope you are really going to
enjoy discussing these in the Coursera discussion forum.
And, and in your blogs and on Twitter, too.
And I and the rest of the course team will see
you at the end of the week in our first Google Hangout,
where we'll have a chance to raise some of these questions and issues, live with you.