Sarah the Librarian

Elearning and Digital Cultures finished up about a month ago. However, before life got in the way of me finishing this class on time to get a completion certificate, I had most of my ideas in place for my final project, so I'm presenting it now, mostly for myself, to prove that I got something out of this new mode of learning. This MOOC has been quite the journey for me. I've been very hesitant of the whole MOOC phenomenon because of my own history with online education. About a decade ago, when I was an undergrad, I took a blended online and in person course on Medieval Latin. I was going to a small liberal arts and with it's block scheduling, our academic calendar didn't match up with the other schools in the course, so I had to rearrange my schedule to fit in the class. Our weekly lectures were streamed online with chat function embedded, but there was only one lab on campus where the computers had the software and headphones available to access these lectures wi...

I realize that #edcmooc finished up several weeks ago, but the last weekend of the course when I planned to finish up all my projects happened to be a perfect storm of excuses not to work on this class, which might be a great start to a conversation on completion rates for MOOCs and what that means in terms of how successful they are, but that's for another time. Before life got in the way, I had this blog post on Week 4's readings nearly ready to go, so I'll present it to you now. This week we talked about posthumanism, what happens when technology has enhanced the human form so much that we are no longer human, but something else. It seems like the central concern here is if at some point adding technological enhancements to the human form will become advanced to the point that accepting such enhancements will forfeit something essential to the human experience. Transhumanists argue that this is not the case, at least not right now. They argue that humanity has such...

While initially it was hard for me this week to transition from the class's first theme of "Dystopia/Utopia" to the second of "Being Human", now I have so many thoughts on the topic, I don't know where to start. I find the movie Wall-E coming to mind again, maybe because I haven't read Brave New World , which has been talked about a lot. I guess Wall-E  is my example of a world where technology has taken over subtly, lulling us into complacency by giving us everything we could ever want - except for the things that arguably make us human. Sometimes this is the way I feel about TV, especially Netflix. In theory this sounds like a great service. You can stream TV shows and movies you're interested in whenever you feel like it, so the convenience aspect is wonderful. But somehow it all gets flipped on it's head, and instead it becomes so important to not only watch what I want, but the idea of a queue makes watching feel like another thin...

This week we stuck with the thoughts of utopias/dystopias, but turned our focus toward the future. One of the articles we read this week discussed the metaphors used to describe the internet in the media. I knew we used metaphors to describe the internet, but I was surprised at how prevalent this practice was once I saw a sampling of them all laid out. Not surprisingly, many metaphors focused around the internet either as creator or destructor. I was a little surprised, though, to see how prevalent the "internet as physical place" metaphor still is. I know social networks and "meeting" with people online is all the rage now (I am taking a class that meets solely online), but I didn't think about how that's tied back to the earlier days of the internet when people really struggled to understand what the world wide web was and there were tons of representations of it as a physical space, even a Saturday morning cartoon  based on the premise that the web was...

This winter I decided to try out a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) to see what all the fuss was about and to get a better handle on what's going on with online educational in general. I'm taking E-learning and Digital Cultures offered by the University of Edinburgh through the Coursera platform. The class started last week, but I'm just getting around to blogging about week one now. For the first week we watched several videos focusing on dystopias/utopias as a way of looking at technology and we read some things from the recent history of technology and e-learning. We were asked to blog about any examples of technological dystopias/utopias we could think of. For me the movie Wall-E  sprung to mind pretty quickly. Here we have a society living in blissful listless ignorance thanks to the wonders of technology. They think this is as good as it gets, until the natural non-technological world comes crashing in and they realize just how much of life was blocked out by ...