Unit 2 Flashcards
Media Ecology:
The study of media (or human-made artifacts/technologies) as environments. Each medium (technology-in-use) enacts it own unique complex of effects and side effects on our personal, social, cultural, political ecosystems.
Neil Postman’s Principles of Technology:
- All technological change is a Faustian bargain. (Has equally good and bad qualities).
- The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population.
- Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, (sometimes two or three powerful ideas).
- A new technology usually makes war against an old technology. It competes with it for time, attention, money, prestige, and a “worldview.”
- Technological change is not additive; it is ecological.
Media Ecologists aim to discern a technology’s “biases” through…
its effects and unanticipated side-effects.
Marshall McLuhan:
All media technology works over us completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.
The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the way media works in environments. Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body. Media, by altering the environment, evokes in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act. When these ratios change, we change.
The McLuhans’ Laws of Media
Marshall and Eric McLuhan propose that all technologies have four basic effects in common.
● Enhancement
● Obsolescence
● Retrieval
● Reversal
They called these effects the Laws of Media.
The Laws of Media - Enahncement:
Every medium or technology enhances some human function.
The Laws of Media - Reversal:
When pushed far enough, the new medium or technology reverses or flips into a complementary form.
The Laws of Media - Retrieval:
In achieving its function, the new medium or technology retrieves some older form from the past.
The Laws of Media - Obsolescence:
It pushes aside some other medium or technology, which was used to achieve the function.
Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy of Technology:
‘Being’ for indigenous thought is something that is not controllable as a whole by the human self, and the Western Platonic tradition emphasised ‘Being’ only as equatable with a concept, not as the actual disclosure of the world mystery.
Instrumental Technoethics:
Focuses on policies, laws, and human agency. This perspective views technology as a neutral tool that must be used responsibly by educators, ensuring compliance with regulations on data privacy, student rights, and acceptable use.
Sociomaterial Technoethics:
Examines how technology influences behavior and power dynamics in educational settings. This perspective sees technology as an active participant in shaping classroom interactions, embedding biases, and affecting decision-making. Humans, when using a technology, are human-nonhuman hybrids or assemblages. Every technology (nonhuman) has built-in biases or “scripts” (programs) that suggest actions for us to follow when we use it. Every technology (nonhuman) is a political (co)actor. I.e. it is an
agent of power when coupled with a human.
Existential Technoethics:
Explores how technology mediates human experience, perception, and identity. It considers the ways in which technology transforms students’ and teachers’ ways of knowing, being, and interacting with the world.
SAMR:
The SAMR Model is a popular framework for technology integration in education, first introduced by Ruben Puentedura in 2003. The acronym SAMR stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition, representing a laddered, four-level approach to help teachers evaluate how they incorporate technology into their teaching. When he first presented SAMR, Puentedura drew connections between his model and the work of philosopher Don Ihde, every technology amplifies or enhances certain human abilities while simultaneously reducing or diminishing others. However, in developing SAMR, Puentedura focused only on the amplification aspect of technology - while overlooking its reductive effects. Because of this omission, SAMR lost its original claim to being a theoretically grounded model. Further, little research has been conducted on its efficacy, and there is no evidence that encouraging teachers to scale the SAMR ladder from Substitution to Transformation necessarily benefits learners.
To use SAMR is to reflect on how you are integrating a chosen technology into your classroom. Ask: Is my proposed use of this technology…
* acting as a substitute for a previous tool with no functional change (Substitution)?
* acting as a substitute for a previous tool with a functional improvement (Augmentation)?
* allowing for a significant task redesign (Modification)? or
* allowing for the creation of new tasks that were previously inconceivable (Redefinition)?
