Disruptive Technologies

Course site for Disruptive Technologies. Exploring identity, community, & design.

Tag: Synthesis

Bittersweet, Like an Apple Removed from My Heart

So guess what? This is it. It’s a bittersweet moment as I sit here typing out my final blog post. I had so many goals and aspirations to achieve this semester and reached some while never thinking twice about some others. Then there are the goals that I achieved without intending to. You may be wondering what some of those goals are, but I’ve decided to not tell you. If you’re reading this, then let me tell you that you have been blessed with a magnificent brain that can come up with ideas that I could never dream of—don’t let me hold you back.

 

There is one thing that I learned this semester that I really think you should keep in mind. It’s all about people.

All of this. School, technology, families, the postal service, all of our communities, everything. Don’t take people for granted, but in turn, don’t take yourself for granted either. You’ve fought half the battle by just taking the moment to read this. It proves that you not only want to, but can do it. If you’re having this read to you, guess what, you still can.

 

After school special aside, this has been a great semester. It’s one of the first courses where I felt like whatever I put in I got in return. I definitely appreciated that it was taught and attended by university administrators–not to have an outlet to vent, but it was encouraging to see that the people behind so many emails care about improving the school and are motivated to do it with students in mind.

As you should know by now if you’ve been keeping up with this blog and course, we had iPads all semester. Needless to say that all my plots to keep mine have been thwarted by that nifty ID number on the back. Oh well. I must say that I don’t know if this semester could have been possible without them. They established a baseline technology that we could implement in whichever ways we saw fit to be successful in school. I frequently caught myself panicking if I left my iPad at home (moreso than if I left my phone). It has been everything this semester–never leaving my side. It took some getting used to, but wasn’t unbearable, and since it was new, it forced me to begin thinking out of the box in general. In essence, it was disruptive. Knowing that I would be giving the iPad back, I can speak honestly and say that I failed and didn’t push it as far as I could. As a broke college kid, I refused to spend money on it. If I had brought my own, or purchased it in the beginning, I think my selection of apps and utilities would have been much more in depth (would have had an external keyboard too). Do I think iPads should be implemented in education? Definitely. Will something new need to be added eventually? Definitely. Is that okay and natural? Definitely.

 

I bid you adieu, and may the dreams of a back button forever rest with you, my dear Future People.

Technically Yours,

Richard.

Final Synthesis – Team Right Shark

Final Synthesis

Listen Up, Can Anyone Hear Us?

To prepare for Thursday’s synthesis presentations, those of us that like to be Too Disruptive would like for you to do two things. First, take a look at Sam Richards’s Ted Talk,  “A Radical Experiment in Empathy.”

Then, we would like for you to take a brief, semi-anonymous quiz. Especially since this is such a small class, we hope that everyone gets a chance to take the quiz (even Cole). Also, please do so no later than Thursday at noon so we will have time to compile the results.

Click here to take the brief quiz, Making ‘My’ Way Downtown

Educational Culture Shock & the End of College

Check out this disruptive article on higher education: NPR Interview with Kevin Carey, author of The End of College, Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere.

This is not specifically related to our new section on identity, but it resonated with some of my musings over the past couple of weeks on how CDT450 is causing me to experience “educational culture shock.”

Since we started with this class, CDT450, our forward thinking approach has required me to consider my learning process in the university classroom setting from a new perspective. One of the main challenges and opportunities that I am facing in this class is using social media as a tool for learning new material, communicating my thoughts and ideas, and engaging in this class to a degree that I have never experienced before.
I have always thought about and experienced education as a passionate learner; since this class started I have become more conscious and aware of one aspect of my traditional perspective on learning in a university setting: I go to a classroom to be both active and passive in a collective learning experience, in a shared space with a teacher/facilitator and other students.
I read material, listen to music, watch videos, and consume information outside of class to prepare for the interaction inside the classroom. Sometimes I have been required to meet with other students in groups online, or face-to-face, but these interactions with other learners outside of the classroom has been sporadic.
I recognize that I have had a compartmentalized perspective of my personal learning process, and of the educational institutions that I have been part: it’s as if learning is a constant part of my life, but the active interaction with other scholars, students, professors, researchers, people, etc. is mostly reserved for class time.

ALL OF THIS IS CHANGING.
Now in CDT450, my concept of learning and participating has expanded and my engagement with the subject matter and students, and professors has become more commonplace and I find myself making more connections.

A big part of this change has to do with this course being specifically designed to integrate technology into the learning process by using hardware like the iPad, and software which includes social media and other tools for finding and engaging in material related to topics covered in the class.
Now I’m using social media apps as part of my learning process inculding WordPress, Yammer, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc.
I have used Google Docs many times to collaborate with students and professors on projects inside and outside of class, but now I’m using Google Docs in a way that’s completely new – as a space to dialog online with other students who are part of a study group that I’m in. We log in to a document and have a conversation about the topic at hand in the Google doc, where we share links, socialize, discuss, and preserve an evolving record of how our conversation develops, and how it specifically relates to the task at hand and the material presented in the classroom.

All that to say: I can’t get away from this class – which is good, because I’m passionate about teaching and learning and participating in the present revolution that is taking place in education. In one sense I feel the burden of constant connectivity that can cause stress for people who are always plugged in through mobile devices and social media networks, but at the same time I’m inspired because the sharing and developing of ideas is no longer compartmentalized for me – now I am more conscious that my learning process is multi-modal discourse that’s going on continuously on a local and global scale.

Synthesis – Community – Team Right Shark

Link to presentation

Readings for Synthesis Presentation – Too Disruptive

Please complete the following readings before class on Thursday.

Related to Cluetrain Manifesto:

  • http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/03/cluetrain-manifesto-still-relevant-10-years-later086/

    While reading, think about what theses from the original Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) are still relevant today. Which theses are no longer relevant in 2015?

  • We will also be watching a scene from the 1986 film Jumpin Jack Flash during class. You do not need to watch the movie as a homework assignment, as we will just be showing a short clip during our presentation.

Wenger Readings:

http://wenger-trayner.com/resources/are-the-new-web-2-0-technologies-relevant/

http://wenger-trayner.com/resources/online-communities-of-practice/

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