Pixellated Worlds Unbuilt

On World Builder:




But we do that all the time, whether in the Real World or the Virtual one.  We, as humans, adapt our environment to ourselves as a matter of course.

Sometimes we build with Legos. sometimes we use bricks, sometimes we play Minecraft. Sometimes we paint flowers, sometimes we breed new ones, sometimes we Photoshop images to create the flowers from our dreams. It's part of our nature as humans!

Tolkien created his own world before Todd Howard created Morrowind.  Children played with dollhouses before the Sims came along.

We build houses, we make babies, we plant carrots, we bake bread. We write poems, we act out stories, we sing bardic tales, we dance our emotions. We create virtual Utopias and Dystopias, we rearrange faces, we record songs, we pass on stories in pixellated form.

We are stories, we are poems, we are love and hate and fear and joy. We are too much reality to be unbound by our virtual experiences.

#edcmooc

My Digital Natives

Since I have  read all the various and sundry pieces and watched the videos, it's time for an Experience Piece to link ideas to one family's life:

We got our first computer back in the mid '80s: an Atari that had no hard drive but which accepted BASIC pretty easily. By the time our oldest son was born, we had an IBM clone with a color monitor, and 10 hours of internet a week. I was IT at our house. I became rather good at swapping out parts and chasing down viruses.

By the time our oldest son was ten, he was beginning to take over some of my IT duties. By the time his youngest brother was eight, he had built a computer out of spare parts that were laying around the house. It ran a stripped-down version of Linux and had no RAM because he couldn't find any that fit. The boys began building computers for friends and local small businesses.  All of this more complicated work was done with help from online friends and tech websites.

Since our kids were homeschooled until it was time for college, they were immersed in the online world for more of their education than most. They seem to be much more capable of finding information and distributing it. They can teach themselves nearly anything from a Youtube video or a Google search, and they retain the knowledge very well. They are truly digital natives.

They also have social lives, both on and off line. They have played sports, been in bands, gone to dances, hung around with neighborhood kids. They have formed strong friendships both on and offline.  
They've met many of their online friends - we've had visitors from several US states and Canada that they've known for years only as digital friends. The older ones have plans to travel Europe to meet several of their more distant correspondents. There have been a few negative experiences, but those have been rare.

I have seen some who have withdrawn into the digital existence nearly entirely, but those are the exception, and they are the type of people who probably would have withdrawn into something besides this present reality anyway.  At least the online world offers real interaction with other real people, which is more than anyone can say about books or television, which is what people like that tended to withdraw into before the advent of the internet.

#edcmooc

Video time!

“I would take us all back a thousand years, when our ancestors lived in small villages and there was always a healer in that village—and his job wasn’t to give you heart surgery or medication but to help find a safe place for conversation.” Dr. Mehmet Oz

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/02/04/130204fa_fact_specter#ixzz2JNd2kTQP

Most of the videos  and that quote seem to go together in my mind. Let's go back to a quiet, safe pastoral existence where all was peace, calm and safety...except that it wasn't. The same thing has been said during every information revolution, from the invention of writing to the printing press to the radio. Too much change too fast is disorienting, and it is always possible to point to some who get knocked down by the tide or lose balance in the maelstrom of change.

The healer who offered conversation would not have much to give my nieces with cystic fibrosis -  but they are alive because of interventions that involve more than village elders, and the new medication that they are on is making a major change for the better.

I realize that Dr. Oz is a heart surgeon and obviously deals in more than treating with reassurance.

The real question is how to balance through change, how to make it work for us and not come to rule us.

And, in the end, Nature will always have the last word.

For media examples of technological change, look to Star Trek: The Next generation, which presents a (mostly) Utopian view. Or compare Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series and the recent BBC adaptation Sherlock, where the technology that was cutting-edge in Doyle's time becomes the technology that is now prevalent.

We have  a device in our pockets that can connect to all the knowledge in the world. Mainly we use it to look at cats and post sarcastic remarks.

This stream-of-consciousness style writing is in no way to be taken for finished thought, and may make no sense whatsoever. 

#edcmooc

Starting Out

I'm starting this blog to document my experience with the Coursera course E-learning and Digital Cultures from the University of Edinburgh. Meditations will follow; after that, dessert!


The first lesson discusses the dichotomy of views of the Internet: Utopian vs, Dystopian. That births a question that screams to be asked: Why two diametrically opposed options? Major changes of life have occurred in the past, and the results were almost always mixed. It's like the pointless debate on nature vs. nurture. Now it's time to find out why the debate is so structured, and where it's going.

Looking forward to the videos!

#edcmooc