Wrestling with "Transhumanism"

Wow - just finished reading the article by Nick Bostrom, of Oxford University on Transhumanist Values. http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/values.html. I must admit to having a predisposition to thinking that some of these discussions reside best in the realm of science fiction. And yet the concept that through evolution and technology, humans are and will be moving in the direction of a much different version of humanity that presumeably is better is an interesting one. As I look around the world, and observe events, I constantly ask myself the question, is the world getting to be a better place?  Improvements in medicine, and particularly those generated by improving technology certainly and obviously have the impact of enhancing not only lifespan but also lifestyle. Many areas of the world have made great strides in the development of more universal human rights respect. Don't know actual statistics, but my sense is there seem to be fewer wars and conflicts going on in the world than at other times in our history.

And yet on the other hand, the issues of inequality raised in the article certainly mitigate against societal improvements resulting from individuals moving into transhumanism. The gains from medicine are certainly visible in the first world, but what about the rest of the world. What about the first world members who have no access to the latest in medical development? Even though in the west we trumpet our freedom to choose, in many ways, the freedom to choose unhealthy lifestyle choices - a sedentary lifestyle, unhealthy dietary habits results in epidemic rates of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer.

In the realm of education, the question needs to be asked - is the world as a whole become more enlightened through education? Here in Canada, we again trumpet equality of access to primary, secondary and higher education.. Our system is doing well by international standards, graduation rates are going up, percentage of our population who are university educated is at an all-time high. Yet watch what is popular on TV, in newspapers in society - observe how little reading is actually done - the prevalence of educated, intelligent discourse in popular culture seems to be on the decline, with many blindly accepting what the mass media is telling them, without a lot of healthy, educated discussion or critical thinking.

So in my mind, the jury is still out on whether we are moving towards a transhumanist ideal. Pockets maybe - more widespread in the future, perhaps. In the meantime, as an educator of about 120 students in a year, I carry the satisfaction in knowing that I have influenced some young people towards a brighter future - and hopefully some of them will move on to better the lot of their fellow human beings, and future generations of humans, post or trans.

Injecting the "human" in teaching and learning

My reply to this discussion is coloured by two perspectives - I work in a Canadian Secondary school - teaching mainly 15, 16 and 17 year olds, mostly males (computer science). The second perspective I will address is my (somewhat limited) experience with online courses.
In the first case, if I see my job primarily as a dispenser of information, and the process of education as the students absorbing and regurgitating that information, the element of humanity becomes less of an issue. Nevertheless, I find that I am at my best as a teacher, and my students learn best, when I make a concerted effort to inject humanity into the process -even a highly technological subject like computer science. For me, that means building personal relationships with students, letting them see that you are a multi-dimensional person who shares similar interests with them, who is interested in reflection and dialog on a variety of subjects, who gets to know them sufficiently to differentiate the delivery according to individual needs. For my students, these methods are much more motivating than anything else I can do.
      My personal experience with online courses tells me the same from my perspective as a student. I am following a series of lectures from a seminary on theology and church history. All I do is listen - fascinating stuff, but purely passive - and purely one dimensional - and sometimes hard to stay focussed (especially when done on the Internet where there are so many other distractions). I have taken pedagogy courses which are online, and which involve some interaction with instructors and other students - all text based - the interaction is interesting, subjects are fascinating, but not as gripping as this MOOC. What for me injects the humanity into this MOOC are the interactions with classmates - not so much academic and intellectual discourse - as interesting as that is - but the hints I get from peoples postings - of what they are experiencing - exhilarated, engaged, focussed - yes, but also frustrated, overwhelmed, confused, lacking in confidence etc. I love the wonderful variety that comes from the perspective of so many from around the world. The variety of approaches (video, text, interaction, free-form) of this course give it that humanity. I would also say the ability to see the instructors in the hangout really made the course come alive for me - to realize there are real people behind the writing and the emails - to get some glimpse of the personalities - and the comments in various postings - to realize Jen Ross is a fellow Canadian. These for me have helped build the sense of community and the sense of engagement with the course - what I would call humanity.

Why Things Matter #EDCMOOC

I found the Julian Bleeker article . A manifesto for networked objects — Cohabiting with pigeons, arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things  http://www.scribd.com/doc/14748019/Why-Things-Matter very fascinating. I'm not really sure what the connection with education, or this #EDCMOOC is, or whether the thoughts have any relevance to my teaching practice, but who ever said there had to be an application?  We've all seen news reports of the webcams scattered all over the world that document in real time the activities of animals in remote locations - there is the great white shark cruising the waters off Massachusetts, the student in Ukraine who recently observed a rare eel (I think) off the coast of Victoria, BC - not to mention the ubiquitous webcams scattered and aggregated in cities all over the world - that are occasionally fascinating to look in on, sometimes useful when checking weather or traffic conditions, sometimes scary in terms of the impact on privacy. Little discrete streams of information that, of themselves may at best be fascinating, at worst trivial and boring. What this article highlights for me is I think a question that applies not only to "Things  that Blog", but also people that blog - and here is the connection to the MOOC. We are constantly bombarded with tons of little discrete bits of information from countless sources - it may be fascinating to know that my relative in Europe had "Snert" for dinner, or that my niece just bought a new iPhone, or went to see "Django" at the movie theatre. - or maybe not. It may be hugely fascinating to talk with an educator in Ecuador or Sao Paolo via a MOOC about an educational issue. How do we extricate and interpret the "Blogjects" as Bleeker describes them - the larger meanings -the big picture that comes from aggregating all the discrete pieces of information - the social impacts, the environmental impacts of all the small pieces that we are constantly streamed with. This idea of "things that blog" was a totally new one for me. Looking for the grander pictures from "people that blog" to me are an issue in digital culture and perhaps education that we are just starting to scratch the surface of as societies, and I think represent a very large trend for the future.

The Week 2 Video - "Sight"

"increasingly blurry line between the digital and the material might play out in the sphere of human relationships."

This commentary on the #edcmooc week2 resources page under the "Sight" video made me think of a number of scenarios, some older, some newer of the increasingly blurry line between the digital and material. Playing WII bowling, WII tennis or WII exercise - feels pretty realistic, pretty much fun, and gives you somewhat of a workout - all without the inconvenience of having to leave your home. Makes me think of the GPS - the dystopia being that some people become so dependent on these devices to navigate the countryside when driving - that it has led to the ridiculous situations of people driving much farther than necessary because they were blindly following a machine, someone who drove off the edge of a wharf into the ocean because the GPS told them to turn right, someone who followed a GPS and didn't realize they had crossed an international border. Makes me think of school where for a few misguided students, a shortcut to writing an essay is cutting and pasting text into something that has the appearance of an essay - or the blind dependence on using a calculator to do the math without having a basic understanding of the principles being carried out - leading to that cashier who has no idea how to make basic change when the computer isn't working. Students who can't tell time with an analog clock - students, who when asked to make a poster to illustrate some research, don't think of bristol board, markers, drawings, labelling etc. but do all that digitally using desktop publishing tools. I guess what all these things have in common - including the film's premise of using digital tools to mediate a relationship is that used thoughtfully and appropriately, all these tools can be highly valuable - used blindly, they have the great potential to mislead. Thoughtfulness in the use of digital technology in teaching and learning is a must - should go without saying.

A Grade 11 Student's perspective!

Based on watching the video "Did You Know - 2012", a young man in my class wrote the following. Very insightful on the future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmwwrGV_aiE

Out of the three things im curious about in the "Did You Know" video were, one, if half of what we learn in our study during university have no relevance to us and outdated, do you just learn these things for the time being? And after we finish the course we've taken where will we gain the knowledge when its not being taught to us? Second, In 2013 how are they going to build a super computer that exceeds the computational capabilities of the human brain, if we dont even know the limits of our own brain? and the study of the brain still exists to this day. Third, if we live in "exponential times", how much does the education system have to change in order to make the new generation prepared for amount for the drastic changes in society and technology? Overall though, the video was interesting because of all the new number changes and differences in the world now and the world in the 20th and 18th century as far back as shakespearian times. I hope your weekend went well as well sir.

#edcmooc

Schools are for Fish Too!

  

(image taken from ww2.valdosta.ed)

I am not sure if there are 40000 fish in this picture - perhaps there are that many in the entire school. But then again, our field of vision is limited, and we can only see what our vision can encompass. Why have I chosen this image for a Blog posting in E-Learning and Digital Culture? Yesterday, I had the distinct feeling of being a fish swimming upstream, but not making progress. I guess this was a phenomenon unique to the first day of the course. A few weeks back, I had decided to limit my interaction with the course to three media - Facebook where I already live, Twitter which I also use frequently and Blogger. Seems like a nice manageable way to interact with the course. I have a setting in Facebook that notifies me in my Gmail account of any changes in pages that I follow. I hadn't been in Gmail on the weekend, but yesterday when I opened it up, sure enough, hundreds of entries from Facebook. So, lots of marking specific entries, deleting pages of email references, only to be replaced by another page of entries, hour upon hour of  entries from all weekend. Kicking myself for not creating a unique email address just for this course, hoping I wouldn't accidentally erase an important email - occasionally finding some gem of interest on the EDCMOOC list of emails. Finally got my Inbox all cleaned up - then realized that I could filter those emails off into a separate folder that I can browse at my leisure while keeping my Inbox free for other pursuits. The swimming upstream part was that as I was deleting emails, more and more of them kept coming in - felt like I might be there all morning.

The point? Lots of comments about being overwhelmed with information. Learning, as a digital immigrant (Prensky) how to navigate these new waters of technology. Big learning in the last year or so how to aggregate and archive all the information collected from the Internet - using Diigo to collect and tag bookmarks that are of interest - learning how to aggregate Tweets - keeping good habits of housekeeping, cleaning out lists of bookmarks periodically - good file management on local computer. Sometimes (shouldn't be) surprised at how poorly the digital natives (teens) manage the information they collect, and consider it a part of my role as their teacher to help them learn those skills that are important in today's digital culture.

Now on to other things. Just finished Chandler's essay on determinism. Can totally relate to the debate in my circles of teaching among those who think we should stick with traditional methods of teaching and make students put away their devices, as opposed to those who feel that the progress of technology and its adoption by younger generations of learners is inevitable (determinism) - and our best bet is to adopt and adapt technologies to learning, and hopefully in the process improve engagement, improve learning and improve instruction. Happy MOOC-ing! 

Prioritizing adoption of E-learning technology.

A New calendar year - for me a time to put aside the excesses of the Christmas season, and maybe look towards a leaner (on a number of fronts) new year (without getting too much into the traditional resolutions). My school is semestered - semester 1 ended today - my students all start formal examinations tomorrow. In my own classes, my exams were all in-class. Along with a pile of exams to mark, I have a lot of final projects to do as well - so my main activity (along with some exam supervision) is to get all that completed. But with that background, and the MOOC starting next week, its also a good time to reflect on this past semester - and especially as it relates to how technology impacts my teaching. I created a list of all the things I did this past semester (including some time in the summer) that benefit my teaching long term - it had about 11 items on it - much of it was the mundane, reorganize curriculum, create newer versions of assignments, or in some cases, new assignments altogether. That is all well and good. Some of it involved some new learning on my part in terms of technology. In the summer, I read in someone's blog post, "10 things educators should learn from a technology standpoint". I adopted a few of them - Evernote was one - although I use it more in my personal life than in professional - Prezi was another - the philosophical reasons why it was better than PowerPoint, along with some spectacular examples - was enough for me. I revised 4 large slide shows in my course into Prezi presentations - and beyond the simple mechanics of how to use the software, how to use it effectively is a learning curve. And I forced my students to use Prezi, and that went well as well. I was given a "Mimeo Teach" - ability to create a SmartBoard type system with much less hardware - and incorporating that, along with "Mimeo Pad" - wireless tablet to control computer projection - was also a learning curve, and now its onto using both comfortably and seamlessly in order to enhance teaching. Already starting up with groups in this MOOC, I have, in reading the blogs, Twitter and FB posts of other members learned of some new stuff that looks intriguing and that I want to explore. What I am finding in all this is a real need to sift through all that is cool, new and exciting, and winnow it down to what makes my teaching, and more importantly, what makes my students' learning more effective. I envy those out there who have a full time job as technology coaches in educational settings - and get time to play with all the new stuff out there. The mundanities of everyday life in the classroom take up a large proportion of time - and the opportunities to "play in the sandbox" are limited. Also, perhaps as an artifact of living in the digital age, perhaps for me a sign of aging, is the ADHD that comes from having so much of interest to look at, to read, to explore on the Internet - my list of bookmarks on Chrome and Diigo keeps growing - but often I don't get or take the time to actually read the stuff I come across. So my fear in embarking on this MOOC is information overload. How to be selective in terms of which blog entries to read, which people to follow on Twitter, who to friend on Facebook. I find it hugely fascinating to suddenly have access to a huge diversity of people all over the world who share some common interests - and who have interesting perspectives. And that's before we've even had a chance to hear from the "experts" who run the course. I hope I will be able to pick out 3 or 4 things that I can continue to focus on as I embark with a new group of students starting on Feb. 1 - and hopefully at the end of June look back and be able to measure the progress that I have made, but more importantly, the progress they have made. Which is what this business is all about!

I am starting in another two weeks a Coursera course - E-Learning and Digital Cultures - through the University of Edinborough. I am looking forward to lots of reflection on the issues surrounding using technology in education - much of which I do in my Secondary Education practice already - have for years - but don't always take the time to think about why I do what I do, how learning and teaching can be enhanced with technology, and find out what others are thinking/saying/doing in this field.