My final assignment

This is my final assignment for the E-learning and Digital Cultures course. Watch the video #edcmooc

The utopian and dystopian side of technology

Inbox: a cute short film

This short film shows how the technology can connect people or how this connection can be broken. We can see two sides of the technology. First, the technology provides a meeting between two people, the technology connects people. This is the utopian side. 

However if the technology does not work, the connection is lost. In this film, when the couple lost the communication, they felt bad. What would happen with them if the connection was not restored? Probably they would not meet each other. This point of view shows the dystopian side, when the technology cannot work.

Technology - worshipped and discarded

Bendito Machine III

This story tells us how those characters treat the new technology that comes from the sky. They see this new technology as godlike, but when another one appears, the one before is substituted.

The film suggests what happens in our consumer society, where the ''old" technology is discarded and a new one is adapted. The point is that this ''old'' technology is not too old. Just we see how people change their cell phones (e.g.) less than one year, and buy a new one. A new tech is adapted and worshipped, but in a little time it will be obsolete and it will be seen as junk.

Digital Culture – GOOD and BAD effects (utopias and dystopias)

Before we think about technology and its effects, we must understand 2 concepts: utopia and dystopia. What is utopia and dystopia? We can see this picture and think merely that utopia is an ideally perfect place/state, and dystopia is a place/state in which the condition is extremely bad.

Information technology can be seen as something that has made our life easier as a negative influence in certain ways. In the first block of EDCMOOC, we are focusing on building a point of view about the digital development and the effects that it can induce.

Digital culture and digital education are often described as either utopian (creating highly desirable social, educational, or cultural effects) or dystopian (creating extremely negative effects for society, education or culture).

A explanation about utopian and dystopian vision, by Hand and Sandywell (2002):

Utopian claims	Dystopian claims
Information technologies based on electronic computation possess intrinsically democratizing properties (the Internet and/or worldwide web is an autonomous formation with ‘in-built’ democratic properties or dispositions).	Information technologies possess intrinsically de-democratizing properties (the Internet and/or worldwide web is an autonomous formation with ‘in-built’ anti-democratic properties or dispositions).
Information technologies are intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend themselves to democratizing global forces of information creation, transfer and dissemination.	Information technologies are intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend themselves to control by de-democratizing forces (hardware and software ‘ownership’ equals anti-democratic control).
Cyber-politics is essentially a pragmatic or instrumental task of maximizing public access to the hardware and software thought to exhaustively define the technology in question.	Cyber-politics is essentially one of resisting and perverting the anti- democratic effects of the technology in question.

Resources: class.coursera.org

They're Made Out of Meat

Awesome science fiction short film!

"They're Made Out of Meat" is a Nebula Award-nominated short story by Terry Bisson.

In 2005, Stephen O Regan wrote and directed a live film adaptation starring Tom Noonan and Ben Bailey. The film was made as a final film project for the New York Film Academy.

This story involves two aliens travelling across the universe and they come to our planet. They found out that the human race is meat, just meat.

It is ironic, whereas the human race creates the machines and controls them. According to those aliens, we are not more superior or intelligent than any other race that could exist. We are just a piece of meat that could feed the dogs.

Sight - Looking to the future

This short futuristic film, by Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo, "explores how the ubiquity of data and the increasingly blurry line between the digital and the material might play out in the sphere of human relationships."

Resources: class.coursera.org; vimeo.com

Do you know what is a MOOC?

MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is a model for delivering learning content online to any person who wants to take a course, with no limit on attendance. It is a development in distance education that seeks to reach a large-scale audience of learners by offering the course material free online.

How to succed in a MOOC

Resource: educause.edu; hayspost.com