Leveraging digital technologies#
Digital technologies - personal computers, the Internet, multimedia, business computing, LLMs/AIs... - have held great promise. Many have suggested significant social promise. Yet, the reality has not lived up to the promise. Why? What can be done to improve the situation?
Perhaps the purpose and design of digital technologies has been too commercially focused and insufficiently focused on personal empowerment, social betterment etc? Perhaps people and society aren't ready for individuals to be empowered with the design of digital technologies?
Harnessing the protean nature of digital technology appears to an undelivered promise. Why? How to change?
Current questions#
How might I apply this as part of my teacher-preparation?
Existing work#
Two broad strands, which are entangled
- Technology focus - both digital and broader and ideas about how best to make use of it
- Social/conceptual - how the people and groups of people understand and organise technology
Technology#
nodt - the nature of digital technology - and if/how that can be leveraged.
Conceptual/Society#
The idea of distribution appears to be core. The hacker-ethos-collective-intelligence idea when combined with truly distributed technology (Mastodon) are examples. Perhaps my work echoes this somewhat with the personal, shadow systems, and userscript work.
Related quotes#
Dron and Anderson (2014) quote Churchill (1943) as saying “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us” (p. 50). But digital technologies are different, or at least they can be. Kay (1984) described the “protean nature of the computer” (p. 59) and suggested that it is “the first metamedium, and as such has degrees of freedom and expression never before encountered” (p. 59). However, experiencing the full protean nature of digital technologies requires the knowledge to manipulate them, particularly through (but not limited to) programming. If learning and knowledge are distributed across networks of people and objects – which in contemporary classrooms includes a significant proportion of digital technologies – then the ability to modify digital technologies appropriately would seem to be one approach to enhancing learning, especially given Shulman’s (1987) view that the distinguishing knowledge of a teacher is the capacity “to transform the content knowledge he or she possesses into forms that are pedagogically powerful and yet adaptive to the variations in ability and background presented by the students” (p. 15). With digital technologies it is possible and desirable that we shape our technologies, then our technologies shape us, and then – as we learn – we shape our technologies some more.