Culture, changes and the limitless boundary

First week of the course is almost over so it's important we tackle the assignment in hand:

Ask yourself: what echoes or suggestions of current educational debates can you see and hear in these resources? What has changed? 

To address this question I want to point to one of my highlights from the essay

E-topia as Cosmopolis or Citadel On the Democratizing and De-democratizing Logics of the Internet, or, Toward a Critique of the New Technological Fetishism

Technology as rhetoric and social text: approaching technologies as one
instance of the ‘machinery’ of sense-making practices; emphasizing the
interplay between dominant social rhetorics and the function of tech-
nologies as powerful cultural metaphors across other domains of social
action. The task here is not merely to see technology ‘in’ culture, but to
view technology as culture, investigating the reconfiguration ‘work’ of
different types of agents and users, the role of digital metaphors in
different cultural spheres, and the role of science and technology as social
metaphors which redefine received ideas of self, body and society
(Featherstone and Burrows, 1995; Ihde, 1979; 1990; Jones, 1997; Lakoff
and Johnson, 1980; Masten et al., 1997).

To me is vital to explore the roles of digital metaphors beyond devices and both in/within culture and as a culture. The importance of the user goes beyond the intended consequences of the hardware he possesses or can get; is there to be stretched and challenged. This parallel avenue exists as the surplus technology creates by its mere existence and by going as fast as it does, it creates more and more possibility that might not seem obvious right away (like, why do we need an 128G Ipad?). I'm interested on those phenomena because we are living amongst those culturally programmed with this scheme of problem solving/edge exploring bug If you might call it that: Millenials. Yes, I study millenials and that's why this blog exists in the first place.

Back to topic.

There's a charming and also relevant story about this in a recent A List Apart article that I would love to hotlink exactly but can't. Go read it, it's pretty interesting.

The part I want to cite is:

Reseting device expectations
One of the main things I’ve come away from 2012 with is the understanding that people don’t use devices the way we expect them to.
In 2011 I met Ludwick Marishane, a 20-year-old student from South Africa. He’d invented a gel called DryBath that works without water. Because he didn’t have a computer, he typed his entire 8,000-word business plan on his Nokia 6234 cell phone.
People use whatever devices they have access to. Ofcom found that 20 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds visit websites on a game console. It seems like a lot. But it’s easy to forget that for some, a game console may be the only device they have access to that has a browser.
The console browsing experience improved considerably over 2012, which should lead to more people browsing on TVs—so the living room environment is a context we need to be thinking about a lot more in 2013.
—Anna Debenham, freelance front-end developer

So, what have changed? Everything has. Everything IS.

Simply put, there's no obvious limitation anymore for anyone that really wishes to DO (in a per formative sense of the word) with the tools available. This lack of boundaries might be the most revolutionary aspect of the debate of the digital culture in classrooms and general education.

The issue sounds something like this:

If there's no limit (awesome!), how are we going to make sure this status quo continues to be democratic, safe, productive, useful and creatively explored? (scary!)

I have no idea but I'm not urgently concerned right now. Some teenager is hacking a Raspberry Pi to turn off his alarm clock or to find a new way to explore the sky, our bodies, the sea.... or blowing stuff up and watching porn.

And it's ok, really, it's gonna be ok.

New media and me

Im returning to the blog taking space from my regular schedule (of no schedule at all) to take notes about my first MOOC at Coursera.
Stay with me, I promise to make this interesting.


Today I organized my own video screening with the materials from the class (#edcmooc) and had a long chat with a fellow course member. I also read two very interesting essays:

• Chandler, D. (2002). Technological determinism. Web essay, Media and Communications Studies, University of Aberystwyth
• Hand, M. and B. Sandywell. 2002. E-topia as cosmopolis or citadel: On the democratizing and de-democratizing logics of the internet, or, toward a critique of the new technological fetishism. Theory, Culture & Society 19, no. 1-2: 197-225. (p.205-6) 

The second one focuses on definitions, limitations and introduces very strong propositions about how to handle our technological fetishism. The first one ends with this phrase:

things are what we make with words.

Words. Like. These.

We love to think about powerful mass media, intrusive technology (dystopian ideas included), means and ways of repetition and education and seem to forget that everything would be completely useless without the power of words molded as ideas, in bits, or even color-coded. 

I'm certain none of this simplifications function as frontiers for the concepts we try to delimiter on 2013:

Utopian claims	Dystopian claims
Information technologies based on electronic computation possessintrinsically democratizing properties (the Internet and/or worldwide web is an autonomous formation with ‘in-built’ democratic properties or dispositions).	Information technologies possessintrinsically de-democratizingproperties (the Internet and/or worldwide web is an autonomous formation with ‘in-built’ anti-democratic properties or dispositions).
Information technologies are intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend themselves todemocratizing global forces of information creation, transfer and dissemination.	Information technologies are intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend themselves to control by de-democratizing forces (hardware and software ‘ownership’ equals anti-democratic control).
Cyber-politics is essentially a pragmatic or instrumental task of maximizing public access to the hardware and software thought to exhaustively define the technology in question.	Cyber-politics is essentially one ofresisting and perverting the anti- democratic effects of the technology in question.

The videos required for this week focus on the relationship machine-human as medium-message and aspiration-reality, need-want.

I can honestly say that they were very on point picking on the concepts of utopia-dystopia UNTIL... I got very sad because I felt a connection where I wasn't supposed to. 

The description of the clip is "A very short, very grim representation of the effects of technology on humanity". Sad part is that I really really would love to be permanently connected to "the feed" (one, many, every one) and I would be happy about that. I would totally volunteer for a beta of the project.

Nothing more to say.

I mean, who wouldn't?!
Hello?!
??!

John Newbery: the first of a kind

Today's quote, some history on children literature:

John Newbery expanded upon that meager foundation and established it solidly in the publishing world with the 1744 printing of A Little Pretty Pocket Book generally recognized as the first children's book written primarily for youngsters' enjoyment. In 1759 and 1761 he again stressed the importance of entertainment, this time through two nonfiction works, A Pretty Book of Pictures for Little Masters and Misses; or, Tommy Trip's History of Birds and Beasts; with a familiar Description of each in Verse and Prose, and The Newtonian System of Philosophy, adapted to the Capacities of Young Gentlemen and Ladies, and familiarized and made entertaining by Objects with which they are intimately acquainted. Newbery, however important historically, remained a lone figure in children's literature in the eighteenth century.-

 Abrahamson, Richard F, and Betty Carter. “What We Know About Nonfiction and Young Adult Readers and What We Need to Do About It.” Publishing Research Quarterly Spring (1992) : 41-54. Print.

So, that's where the Newbery medal, awarded annually by the American Library Association for the most distinguished American children's book published the previous year, got its name from.

Yet again, it's important to note that Newbery worked according his own philosophy of the bussiness very early on: one where the material was conceived as entertainment and enjoyement (as the quote says) and not as education as exclusive goal.
I like this guy.

Bordieu's bestsellers: art?

Today's quote comes from one of my top theorists:

Bourdieu argues that labeling some work commercial and some noncommercial (or serious literature), a dichotomy that characterizes so much discussion of books and publishing, is an important strategy for marking the differences between the high and the popular aesthetic.
The opposition between the "commercial" and the "non-commercial"
appears everywhere. It is the generative principle of most of the judgements which, in the theatre, cinema, painting, or literature, claim to establish the frontier between what is and is not art. (138)
-
Haugland, Ann. “The Crack in the Old Canon : Culture and Commerce in Children’s Books.” The Lion and the Unicorn 18.1 (1994) : 48-59. Print.

It's important to consider that after all, this endless discussion about what is art is fueled by how valuable the work is for market that stablished it as a representation or product of its high culture.

How can I write a thesis in marketing in the publishing industry without steping into the mud of the definition of art?
This is getting way too complex...

Hyperlexia

Today's quote comes from Wikipedia:

Hyperlexia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  (Redirected from Hyperlexic)
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Difficult Lesson (1884)

Hyperlexic children are characterized by having average or above average IQs and word-reading ability well above what would be expected given their age.^[1] First named and scientifically described in 1967,^[2] it can be viewed as a superability in which word recognition ability goes far above expected levels of skill.^[3] Some hyperlexics, however, have trouble understanding speech.^[3] Some experts believe that most or perhaps all children with hyperlexia lie on theautism spectrum.^[3] However, some other experts believe the involvement of autism in hyperlexia is completely dependent on the type of hyperlexia.^[4] Between 5-10% of children with autism have been estimated to be hyperlexic.^[5]Hyperlexic children are often fascinated by letters or numbers. They are extremely good at decoding language and thus often become very early readers. Some hyperlexic children learn to spell long words (such as elephant) before they are two years old and learn to read whole sentences before they turn three. An fMRI study of a single child showed that hyperlexia may be the neurological opposite of dyslexia.^[6] Whereas dyslexic children usually have poor word decoding abilities but average or above average reading comprehension skills, hyperlexic children excel at word decoding but often have poor reading comprehension abilities.^[6]

Have you heard of Hyperlexia before?