Scribbles – Week 4

When designing online curriculum the “technology as multiple” idea really starts to become evident. As a medium, we want technology to be invisible as Soloway mentioned when interviewed by Robert Scoble. We want the technology to be invisible as a clock is invisible when we look at it to tell time; we see the time, we don’t see the clock.

Technology is a space because we use it to organize our thoughts, files, resources, music, videos and anything else that has a digital format.  It is comprised of an infinite number of interconnected rooms that we can use as we see fit. There are now sites that allow us to store our pictures and videos of our family vacations, sites that act as an online file cabinet for our documents, presentations and any other information that we might have need to have access to from any computer. This allows us to stop worrying about whether we have enough space on our flash disks or whether we even remembered to put it in our bag before we left the house or office.

Technology is a resource in that it connects us to worlds of information that we wouldn’t have access to otherwise.  We can read articles and books that we could never actually touch and we can have rich conversations with people that we never actually see or hear.  Chat rooms have developed so that people with almost any interest can get together to exchange ideas and information. Journals are published online and allow us access to scholarly articles that we would never have seen in the past.

In a similar way, technology is a tool that gives us computing, word processing, and information storage and retrieval systems with the click or two of a mouse that would have taken us hours or days to compute or organize in the past. A spreadsheet can be made and organized or reorganized to see the data from any point of emphasis that we choose. Databases are built that hold the answers to questions that we may not have yet thought to ask.

Reading this chapter of the text made me start thinking seriously about what it would take to design an online environment for TYC students to use. In the 2008 version of the text Terry states that Athabasca University went with Moodle as its LMS system wide. What would it take to convince the folks at IRD in Austin that Moodle could be put on our server without causing the entire system to implode? Would the administrators and other teachers “buy into” the idea of an online curriculum and would the teachers be willing to help in the development of these courses?

Davis states, “Any credible educational endeavor is dynamic in nature, responding to new knowledge, understandings, and approaches to the disciplines, to new employment market needs, to changing student demographics, and so on.” However, in my experience, public schools are either quite slow to change or they follow some education guru without really understanding the ramifications of the changes.