Technological Mediation

Summer is here and its languid air leaves me with a desire to lay back and do nothing. That I have not really worked for two years is a selfish luxury. I have been able to spend the years idling away at the passions of my choosing, but that luxury is soon to expire. I have a dissertation to perform. I say perform because of the acts and measures one must follow in its execution. It is a dance to learn the style of and perform in front of a panel of judges. At the least, one can choose the genre, and perhaps my genre is well suited to me. 

Thoreau advised, "Draw as near the channel in which your life flows." I find that this channel is about how we must consider technology. I am pursuing a degree in Education—this may have been a misstep, for I am principally interested in our relationship with technology. The sign of life is, as Heidegger observed, the other things that exist in the world, made by other beings—one need not ever see another human and one could ascertain that others have, in fact, existed.

Now, this channel concerning technology, I have nestled up near it in terms of educational topics. I will examine the ecological affects of an education technology on the learning environment. We are mediated through our tools. We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us. Unwittingly, I suggest, we have decided on what tools to use to enable learning. As such, this choice of tools, the technology determines just how we go about learning. More so, we utilize techniques to go about how we choose the technology to teach and learn; it is tech- all the way down.

Yet, we have dodged a central question: what is our relationship with technology? Again, Heidegger points out that, at its essence, technology is an ordering/enframing of the world. One that can bring forth or challenge forth. We find technology is almost always a challenging-forth which makes us set upon one technology for the other. What is this culture wrought that views so much as a means? Francis Bacon laid the groundwork for the world as a standing reserve. Our culture of relating to the world has sprung from such revelations.

So, I am to set on a task to examine how the utilization of online-learning technology shifts the learning environment and the way we relate to one another in the classroom.