This post is another mashup of ideas from experiences and posts from other blogs, just waiting for everything to knit together. The mashup started with the video that Wes posted this week. I sent this out to a group of faculty staff and even though most of them are involved and interested in the use of technology, I only got two responses. This is not unusual as it’s not very likely that people reply with more than a “cool” as they are busy with all manner of other activities in their day. So when I got two replies, I thought – score! The first, was a “wow that was cool” reply, that made me think that even if the story is a bit tilted, it will, in it’s short span, get a point across. The next email I got was rather negative. This wasn’t really surprising, but the reasons why the individual thought that the video wasn’t any good harked to me about only one thing… a lack of understanding of new media and acknowledgment of new ideas of learning models and literacies. I think it fits together with elearnspace’s post about the death of print and how many people are holding on to the print based learning model. The one thing that he did point out correctly was about the cost of mobile data – so very true as pointed out by OLDaily. For the rest, I took the time to cook up a reply pointing out the flaws in his argument and hoping for a conversation. This has yet to happen, but while I wait, this experience knit together with other bits that I have read recently.
First, Scott McLeod’s post about “Everything Bad is Good for you”, where he points out the quote from Marshal Mcluhan:
The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.
This was core to the reply that I sent to the negative response to the video. The original negative post commented that nothing digital is any better (or at least implied this) than it’s “old school” A/V or analogue version. I commented that everything that we have now is a re-hash, it has to be, but the difference is that these new versions extend some functionality or increase accessibility. This along the lines of OLDaily’s post on the Law of Media, I’m still waiting on a reply.
Second, from Tim’s Assorted Stuff, talks about the use of cell phone in schools. The negative post claimed that the txt msgn wasn’t really capable of any important communication (I so wanted to respond – Who judges importance??). The post links to a short news story, and with any luck, we’ll see the results from this shortly.
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