#edcmooc Is this progress?

I have to admit that I still wouldn't be capable of defining the difference between posthumanism and transhumanism. I'm a bit confused by the readings in this second part and I am not sure that I am making progress when I read more. I also feel resistance and I've had to puzzle a while to find out why...

Behind all these readings there seems to be a -can I call it childish- need for progression. It seems that we need to believe that human beings can develop and become better (trans)human beings. And that we are either succeeding or failing in that respect. More disturbing, in fact, the general belief that we are now better human beings, that our world is better than it has been..... Why? 

What I miss in the readings is someone saying: look, the world is changing and some things will be better and other things will be less good. Generally speaking, the balance will be about the same.Boring perhaps, to read? Well, tough.

What I think might be wrong is the thinking on a large time scale. Take to your parents and your grandparents about which time was better to live in. If you do manage to get to an agreement it will probably be something like: some things were better then, others are better now. And that is what I see with my own kids too: being bilingual and having family in four different countries their lives are much richer than my own at that age. On the other hand, they lack the coziness and safety of a small community where everyone knows everyone. Is that better or worse? All I know is that it is different. It might suit some better than others, but further than that I wouldn't want to go.

Thinking on superhuman time scales blurs our vision. Is loosing yourself in Science Fiction bad? It is, if it keeps you back from thinking about the -much smaller and possibly less interesting- things that we do have influence on. Does googing change your mind? Who cares but let's make sure that our students know how to sensibly use internet searching and let's think carefully about which data we let out on the internet.

#edcmooc What is being human?

I have saved the most difficult subject to last...
Probably because I am not sure whether it is important to me. My first inclination would be to answer: does it matter? It is one of those questions that we will never be able to answer just because we are (caught in the limitations of being) human. It is like asking 'Does god exist?'. To which the only definite answer, to me, can be 'nobody will ever know for sure'. 

Some of the other questions, though, I do have an opinion about. Did we fail at the humanistic project? Yes, we did. Ted Fuller illustrates this beautifully with his statement that ' In the West at least, Christianity is largely responsible for inducing cultural guilt about the failure of all humans to be treated as humans.'
Dear Ted, and others, even Christianity excluded half of humanity by excluding women from all power positions.

In European education we seem to be regressing to a situation were your chances of good education are becoming more dependent on the financial position of your parents (with the reforms of scholarship systems everywhere).

As teachers we seem to focus more and more on honours programs for the smarter students, or if you want to be cynical those students who have time for extra course work because they don't need a side job to pay for their own expenses.

So for posthumanistic... In Badmington's introduction I recognize our own debates about whether computers could ever become a truly human thinker (in the end of the 80's when we were starting to learn about AI). We had a truly inspiring teacher in philosophy of science (Monica Meijsing) and debated about homunculi, Daniel Dennett, Turing machines and Betty, if I remember correctly a computer playing a psychiatrist. We didn't answer the question, although I am personally convinced that the answer must be no:-)

More recently, I have been into contact with many foreign students and colleagues and I have come to realize how truly trapped we are in our own history and language. 'How can your religion not be an integral part of you identity as a doctor?' was a question from a Pakistani female doctor. And I realized that we certainly never speak about this with our student. In fact when one of our professors made the national press with his statement that he be believes in faith healings our board immediately reacted with the statement that 'his personal beliefs had no influence on his professional behaviour as a researcher or a doctor'.

Could outsiders destroy our ideas about humanism (in a way that, I agree with Derrida, we cannot)? It is an exciting idea, but scary as well. Surely, we do not want to risk too much influence from religious fundamentalists or from fundamental maoists (n.b. I have also seen curricula where the study of Mao and marxism was an integral part of a curriculum in Medecine).

Maybe we just shouldn't be so freaked out. Cultures have merged before in our history, 'live' ones and digital ones, and the effects have never been as extreme as we feared...

#edcmooc Talking about naivety - why should the human touch be always good?

Monke's plea against computers in the classroom has just caused irration.... How naive can you be?

Of course, computers in education are not a replacement for human conversations, or creative subjects. What they are depends on how they are used. For my daughter in senior infants they allow her to practise some slightly more advanced arithmetic than most of the others are up to (once or twice a week). For her teacher it means that she can spend that time on other kids. And vice versa, of course: for my son in 4th class it means that he can get some attention from the teacher when some of the weaker kids are doing remedial sums on the computer.

And what's this other implicit assumption that human conversations are 'naturally good'? How naive can you be? ' Oregan trail'  might not be good at explaining the deeper meaning of American migration, but do you really believe that all teachers are? Please come down to earth. A lot of teachers are not good at deeper meaning... or are simply not interested. Experiencing things with your hands? Sure, very important. But to transfer that to a new situation you need to be smart yourself and/or to have a good teacher (which in some cases might be a computer).

The best examples of computer use, of course, are those where kids collaborate and discuss what they are doing on the computer, explain to each other and teach to each other. Just like they do when they are playing outside.

Computers are just tools, why would we want to go back to education without them? We wouldn't think of throwing out books, or for that matter paper and pencil?

#edcmooc The human element is to show that we care!

Steve Kolowich's claim that including more audio and video in online courses is important certainly contains some truth.... I've experienced this myself when we included just a few homemade clips in our course in which we did little else than explain to each other what we had already written in the course introduction. No new information, unprofessional video, but students appreciated them. Just like they appreciated the online question hours in our virtual classroom, even though most of them did not even participate :-)

This is the human touch, I would agree, but not necessarily audio or video... What works is that we show explicitly that we care about what happens to our students. Answering questions on the discussion board promptly, or e-mailing a student who seems to have dropped out are equally if not more effective.

Yesterday evening I spent 20 minutes on the phone with a student from the other side of the world. I am convinced that I could have answered her questions equally well in writing, in fact I think the answers were already on the discussion board and she did probably read them. I told her nothing new, but the fact that I was willing to talk to her on a Friday evening from home will probably motivate her to spend at least 10 hours more on my course. Maybe 20 even because of the little chat about my ten year old son who was playing computer games. That, I think, is the human touch.

By the way, incorporating audio and video in Blackboard is no longer impossible, certainly not with the incorporation of the virtual classroom Elluminate. Not that I am a big Blackboard fan, though :-)

#edcmooc My goals (or conclusions of week 1 and 2)

More and more I am convinced that digital education has nothing to do with utopia or dystopia, it is at best useful and at worst frustrating.

So, I'll go for the useful, and I have defined two goals for myself for this MOOC:
- try out at least one new tool
- think about how I want to present myself  in the digital world and which tools I want to use for which purposes.

The latter is something that I feel the need for because I am using to many different tools and I am not managing to keep them up-to-date. So I need to think out a strategy, linking some of them up, getting rid of others....I'd love to get rid of Facebook :-)

#edcmooc MOOC experiences

I have restarted after 5 days of Carnaval and family visits. With some difficulty, I must admit. For the past week I have been immersed in non-digital culture and direct human-to-human contact.

What strikes me most, though, are not the differences but the similarities. In the largely home-made  Carnaval costumes I see how different human beings express themselves. Some go for flashy, others for funny. Some are very extravert, some more subtle. Some focus on some gimmick to stimulate interaction with others, others aim at admiration. And some are just loud and boasting, rather a bit like this MOOC.

Somewhere I read frustration about ' ...shouting out to be heard in a large crowd..'. That made me realize I don't necessarily want to be heard. For me this MOOC is a way to take time for myself, for my own professional development without the pressure of being directly useful, related to a project or publishable. The time that I spend on this MOOC is -strangely enough- quiet and very private time. OK, I have send the link to this blog to a few colleagues, but honestly I don't expect them to read it. And I don't mind at all.

#EDCMOOC I vote: abolish

Abolish the terms digital natives and immigrants!

They are a typical example of a misleading metaphor.
First of all, we know from experience and research that a large part of our students are not as native as we expect: they know their phone and Facebook, but very little else. Technology scares them and they are not interested.
Second of all, age has very little to do with how 'native'  you are. Just take one look at our -excellent- course leaders :-)

My own little experience to add: I work as an e-learning advisor and researcher, but now my kids are progressing through primary school I notice that I see far less need or added value for e-learning than I expected. I have bought a grand total of one educational software package... and enjoy inventing sums one when we are baking or passing a petrol store far more.

MOOC experience: I have just watched the hang-out session and that has really helped me to get into the mood of this MOOC far more than any of the videos and readings. Now what does that say about me?

I do so the parallel, though. I clearly remember one of our students saying [after a very innovative and engaging unit]: ' you know this last unit was great, but I hope we are going back to ordinary teaching now, so that I can get a life again'. Students don't want to work hard, and obviously, neither do I.