Course Concussion

Week one of this E Learning and Digital Cultures course is almost over. The marathon analogy has life in it yet, so I will stick with it for now.

 I feel as if the shoe laces on my trainers where tied together and caused me to trip over the starting line. I have limped in a concussed fashion since.

A marathon route through an interesting city provides much distraction from the goal of reaching the finishing line. The challenge is to sort out which of the distractions will provide the food for thought required to fuel the journey, and which are indulgences to bookmark for the post race convalesance.

The required refreshment stop offered 4 short films on the subject of  utopian/dystopian views of technology.
I particularly liked the first two.

Benditto Machine was very dystopian. The question of who was controling who was not, for me, really clear.  Was some sinister being pulling strings? I do not know. Much clearer was the willingness of humans to embrace, worship and depend on the lastest incarnation of the technology god, and perhaps, their fickleness, in the undignified disposal of their deposed idols.

Inbox was short and rather sweet. It was a novel way of demonstrating the power of  currrent technology to connect people. I detected a splash of warning about dependency though. Any teacher who has ever a planned a lesson requiring a live internet link will surely appreciate the despair of the torn red bag moment.
How many such  moments are there when there is a mobile phone outage?

The core reading, Chandler:  Technological  Determinism. is in race sustinance terms, as dry as ships' biscuits, yet it provides the calories needed. Perhaps the Google Hangout provided the tot of rum or glucose drink to go with it. It was interesting to see the faces behind the organisation of this well organised race.
( In deference to them, should I have used an analogy to the Edinburgh rather than London marathon?)
Watching this I was quickly reminded of my concerns about access and inclusion, as local broadband speed was again found wanting.

The #ecmdchat session  on twitter last night was a diversion into a lively, noisy, pub if ever there was one! It was great fun, but was it a good idea to go there when I was already concussed ?

There is a treasure chest of race training techniques,( ie digital tools )to expolre. I have opened accounts with google plus, diigo and wiki,  to add to the facebook, twitter and pinterest ones I had already. On reflection, this could be red herring stuff. Changing training techniques when you are already in a race is not such a good idea. If I don't delete these soon, I will forget the passwords anyway. I may have to explore and persevere with something new in order to produce a 'digital artifact' but that begs the question is the assignment about content, or mastery of a new tool?