Bill's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

As most of us on the course, I spent the first week trying to get a proper feel of what a digital Lifestream is, how it should look like and what it should contain. During week 1, my locus communis on digital culture focused on Twitter-tips for tools like Savevid.com and TwitterBar, videos that use impressive facts and figures in order to present the effect Digital Technologies have had on our everyday lives and musings on digital culture and the future it’s shaping for us. I’m not yet sure that my Lifestream will eventually portray an objective picture of my involvement with digital culture and I don’t see lifestreaming as a mash-up (as the course guide claims), but I’m willing to give it a decent try. In other words, so far so good. I think…

Martin Hand’s chapter “Hardware to Everyware: Narratives of promise and Threat” examines the effect of Digital Technologies and most importantly the Net on the social, cultural, economical and political spheres and presents both utopic and dystopic views. But what does it all have to do with education? No one can deny that Digital Technologies have partly decentralized educational structures such as the University, have provided learners with better access to education by erasing the boundaries of time and distance, have increased interactivity, have further democratized certain educational processes and empowered IT-savvy learners and so on. At the same time, they have created new divides and new forms of exclusion, have allowed for a blurring of the line between information and actual knowledge, have led some theorists to express concerns about the digital commodification of education that is transforming students from active producers of knowledge to passive consumers of information, have boosted technocratic and bureaucratic control in the learning environment and have ushered education in the era of global capitalism.

So who’s right? Digital Technologies are a tool; as is a hammer − and you can use a hammer for building a school or for cracking a skull. Or for both purposes. That is to say, proponents of utopic or dystopic theories regarding the effect of Digital Technologies on culture and education need not be exclusively right. Perhaps utopias and dystopias can paradoxically coexist. And perhaps our responsibility as educators is to focus on the utopic part of the digital future that’s emerging.

Hand, M (2008) Hardware to everywhere: narratives of promise and threat, chapter 1 of Making digital cultures: access, interactivity and authenticity. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp 15-42.

Welcome to my E-learning and Digital Cultures blog. As a trainer with more than 15 years of experience I have seen how the digital profile of the average student has changed during the past decade or so. Once upon a time I would ask my trainees “Which one of you has an e-mail account?” and would consider myself lucky if I saw 1-2 raised hands. Nowadays my trainees are swimming in the ocean of digital culture; they carry mp3 players and powerful mobile phones, they have profiles on various social networking services, they have on-demand access to information on just about anything and anyone, they download films and TV series they wouldn’t have access to in Greece etc. At the same time, however, I frequently feel that they are adrift, that their wandering is not purposeful but aimless. So, the main question is (and it applies to all of us): Do we understand our Digital Culture? Do we have a clear picture of it? Do we recognize its implications, its impact, on various aspects of our lives? Furthermore, as educators, are we in a position to accurately assess the effect digital culture has on our students and our educational systems and methods?

It’s time for answers.