Binary thinking and week 1 #edcmooc

I have to start this by saying "wow!". Attending a google+ hangout today with hundreds of classmates tweeting and commenting through google+ and having five professors from University of Edinburgh interacting with us through our comments in real time was nothing short of exhilarating. This one single experience has done more than any of the other exercises to make me feel like I had "gone to class". My point of comparison is that I recently went back to school after many years away to begin a college certificate program in adult learning, one night a week for three hours with 35 other students. Part of this classroom experience is the live exchange of ideas and participation in exercises that take place as part of our course. I leave feeling exhilarated in the same way - it is connection.

I heard the term binary being used in the google+ conversation today to describe the struggle between utopian and dystopian views of technology as well as between digital and non-digital. It was nothing short of illuminating to listen to that conversation.  

Eureka!

Up to then, from the readings and films, I had been imagining I had to determine whether I believe technology is the devil or the messiah, whether we drive the technology or it drives us.  I recalled a conversation in the car yesterday while driving back from a meeting with a few colleagues. I mentioned to them that I was doing a course through a MOOC and the topic this week is "utopias and dystopias". Everyone in the car had strongly held opinions.

One said that when her boys (who are now in their late twenties) were young, she never let them have video games or computers in their rooms and they all played hockey several times a week. According to her, all of these modern digital devices lead to nothing by trouble. However, she did say that she loves the convenience of being able to text to her family group on her Blackberry and let everyone know simultaneously that she is on her way home without having to make five separate phone calls. Another said that her 14-year old daughter was constantly texting and on facebook with her friends and that it seemed to her the "kids of today" can only communicate with each other in this disembodied way and when they do meet in person, some or all of them are constantly tapping away on their smart phones.

A binary vision is a useful construct to frame our love/hate relationship with digital culture and by extension, digital learning. Faced with the plethora of devices, applications and new developments we can feel unable to keep all of it within our control. Therefore, we feel out of control and inadequate. This leads some to blame the technology and label all that surrounds it a false experience: "when we were young, people wrote letters with a pen and paper and took time to frame their thoughts; we met face to face and people did not rudely text and check email during dinner and social visits". Does this mean that these technologies have somehow diluted or weakened our abilities and social connections?

I understand now why the course material for Week 1, looking at the past, tackles this question directly. 

What I can say now in terms of digital learning is that it is different than classroom learning, but not better or worse. On the positive side, it is certainly a democratizing force in the very real sense I am experiencing it through this MOOC, because it is allowing me to learn from experts who are freely sharing their knowledge with me and who I would otherwise never have been able to reach. But the fact is, and it was made manifest today by seeing five human faces on the screen, they are not digital creations. It is clear they are investing huge chunks of their own time in this endeavour. The technology that allows this to happen is the smallest part of the MOOC; by far, the most important element is the human energy and effort that the professors are pouring into the creation of this experience and the participation by my human "classmates" sitting at their computers all over the world. The other, indispensable element (and this is true for both my classroom learning and the online learning) is my own time spent listening again to the lecture and reading the material. I still feel like many of the concepts that are mentioned in the readings are wisps rapidly falling and floating around me and I can only catch a few at a time, with so many others escaping my grasp. Yet, after week 1, I am left clutching a few of them and hungry to continue our race into the present in week 2.

As for my own conclusion on the binary choices from week 1, I can only say that where learning is concerned, the medium is not the message; rather, the message is the message.