The discussions over at Club Troppo on the future of education have certainly sparked my interest in the topic again. It started with Nicholas Gruen’s brief reflections on why Web 2.0 has not revolutionised education, why it should and how it could. In response, Ken Parish submitted his own personal experiences of adopting new technologies to analysis and critical scrutiny. Immediately, alarm bells rang off about a sort of technological determinism – an erroneous view that I corrected. But, what was lingering in my mind about their analyses and proposals was a submerged and, in my opinion, a problematic reliance upon individual initiative and resourcefulness as the catalyst for change and improvement. I want to offer a more considered response to their views.
This first part will address the specific points raised by Nicholas Gruen and part 2 will speak to the issues discussed by Ken Parish.
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A while ago, when I was still teaching, I stumbled across The Society Pages – a multi-blog social science site hosted by the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. In particular, I was attracted by their Teaching the Social World blog and their Sociological Images blog as they provided pretty helpful resources for teaching sociology. More and more I would wander across their other blogs. Recently, I’ve found a couple of posts over at the Cyborgology blog pretty interesting.
Coming from what looks like quite an eclectic theoretical approach, these guys have been developing a concept of augmented reality to combat the fallacious and inadequate insights offered by what they call digital dualisms – those arguments that rely on problematic assumptions about the separation of the online and offline worlds.
Recently, they published a post about some recent findings from PEW about social networking in the lives of Americans. In particular, the author, Nathan Jurgenson, wanted to highlight how the evidence in this report that at once undermined claims based on digital dualism and supported those based on the concept of augmented reality. I had originally wanted to comment on the way this research into friendship was conducted: that had its own set of problematic assumptions (e.g. equating friendship with connections and vice-versa) and how the concept of augmented friendship could and should offer a better way of exploring the changing character of friendship. To do this, though, I wanted to get a better sense of the concept from which augmented friendship was derived – augmented reality. In the end, the effort to do this took up all the spare time I wanted to dedicate to it and so I had to restrict my comments to my analysis of the theory of augmented reality without touching on friendship.
The comment I ended up leaving on Cyborgology was long and perhaps not so clear, so I offer a brief explanation here followed by a copy of the comment I left on Cyborgology.
UPDATE: It seems someone has anticipated part of my own analysis and Nathan Jurgenson has already offered his own response here.
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