September 28th, 2010
Veltman, Kim H. Understanding New Media: Augmented Knowledge & Culture. University of Calgary Press, 2006.
As I’ve discussed in the past, one of the greatest potential benefits of the online video conversation (OVC) in the asynchronous online classroom (AOC) or anyplace is in regard to space and time; there need be no spatial or temporal concerns in getting to a meeting at a specific a location or time. Rather, one can access a given OVC environment at any time and from the convenience of his or her own home, workplace, or other location. Read the rest of this entry »
September 27th, 2010
With every tool, man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or removing limits to their functioning. – Sigmund Freud (1929).
Veltman, Kim H. Understanding New Media: Augmented Knowledge & Culture. University of Calgary Press, 2006.
Veltman lists the major functions of computers as their ability to perform calculations, write, visualize, create multimedia, enable multi-sensory study, permit inter-media, interact, augment, delegate information/knowledge, and simulate synthetic reason. Of those on the list, I want to focus on multimedia, which is linked with three of the other listed functions: multi-sensory, inter-media, and inter-action. Read the rest of this entry »
September 25th, 2010
Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Vintage, 1993.
Another take-away from Technopoly is somewhat oddly-founded, as it is based on a bit of a tangent that Postman pursues as an example of technologies coming in disguise (in Chapter 8: Invisible Technologies). He discusses the idea of academic courses in the educational world.
A course is a technology for learning. I have “taught” about two hundred of them and do not know why each one lasts exactly fifteen weeks, or why each meeting lasts exactly one hour and fifty minutes. If the answer is that it is done for administrative convenience, then a course is a fraudulent technology. It is put forward as a desirable structure for learning when in fact it is only a structure for allocating space, for convenient record-keeping, and for control of faculty time. (138)
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September 23rd, 2010
“Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely he way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant” (48).
Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Vintage, 1993.
In Technopoly, Postman discusses the role of technology in shaping society and in changing it’s general view. He considers a technopoly, America being the only one currently, to be a society that believes “the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency, that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment … and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts” (51). It is a not-all-too-positive view of tools and technologies running our lives (and for fighting back against such an occurrence), but it has a few select points I apply to my research.
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September 19th, 2010
A colleague of mine recently suggested that New Media is everything newer than the pencil. However, I cannot accept such a simple definition; all media is new at some point. To the chirographic era, the pencil was new media, as was the Gutenberg press. Being that so many new media forms have arisen over the last few decades, what constitutes New Media may differ between individuals. For example, few scholars would consider the pencil to currently be New Media (although some might argue for it). However, as we consider a somewhat more contemporary example, such as the CD player, the level of agreement begins to rise. Of course, newer and unique media forms, such as Skype, Viddler, Jott, etc., are invariably agreed upon as New Media.
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