Week 14

Chapter 31 Reflection "Woo-Hoo!"

Well, as I went through chapter 31, I kept asking myself (being devil's advocate) if these things would really be possible to do and still maintain educational standards, human differences, and ethical standards.  Then I got to the part about Cybernetics and Nanotechnology where Kevin Warwick had a capsule implanted in his arm that was programmed to do things for him.  This was the part in the chapter that I thought... that's pretty cool, but is this something we really want?  So, I suppose I want to strike up some thinking in others about this too.  I think that just about everything mentioned in this chapter is really cool and would love to see most of it in action.  From the advanced performance tracking (don't see much harm here) to the cognitive science and "brain mapping", there are a lot of things that I kept thinking... "this is awesome, but would this really be a good thing?"  Here's why... each person is different.  Those differences make each of us who we are, provide us with different strengths, weaknesses, strategies for getting through life, and different stories to tell.  Basically it gives everyone their own perspective of things.  So, I started thinking, if we can implant a chip into us that we can program to do certain things (maybe that we can't already do) then we may be able to do a task as well as someone that already has the "natural" ability.  Could I take their job?  Could anyone with an implanted chip then do my job?  Do we need educators to the extent we have them now?   All sorts of things began to run wild in my mind.

Okay, so now that I've already gotten too deep in the devil's advocate side of things, I really enjoyed this chapter and could see a lot of these things coming about soon.  I think a lot of this is great stuff, and obviously powerful.  If used in the right way, it could improve many people's quality of life, abilities to learn, and make for a more productive world.  Or would it?  If we don't have to put in all the time and effort like we do now, aren't we being lazy?   Hmmm... there I go again.  :)   This stuff is just all so cool to think about that is starts to spark these types of questions in an analytical mind like mine.  Maybe some of these forms of technology could help me calm my analytical nature.  

Alright, onto my favorite activity of the semester.    Well, for this I had to think pretty hard.  There were a few things I REALLY liked, so trying to pick a favorite was tough.  When it all came down to it, I think I really like the screen casting.   This activity allowed us to use our teaching abilities in a different way.  It actually got me thinking more in depth about how I would describe what I was doing, where to click, how to use the tools, and what would happen as I went through the lesson.  In addition to all this, it gave me a sense of ownership to the lesson since it was my voice, my cursor moving on the screen, and it was posted to the web with my name attached.  In the past I have down some basic video editing, and this seemed very similar in technique to a lot of the video editing I have done, so that made it interesting as well.  Finally, it was my favorite because it produced a tool that I felt I could best use in my own classroom.  There are a lot of cool things we covered, and definitely a lot of useful tools for education, but screen casting seemed to fit best with what I do.  So, for all the above reasons, this was my favorite.  

It's been a great semester!  Thanks to everyone in the class and Dr. Horvitz for making this a successful semester even through times of technological difficulty and headaches.  :)  It's been fun!