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It's about online learning, ya mook

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 all of this technology.

I'm sure I could expand on all of this, but I'm behind and I'd like to catch up. Suffice it to say, I've got lots more thoughts on viewing technology through the lens of utopias and dystopias, but I don't have the time to write it out coherently.
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