technology and pedagogy

My best-blog friend (BBF?) kristina b linked to a video by Michael Wesch’s Kansas State Mediated Cultures website (a part of his Digital Ethnography course) a while ago, and as I keep on teaching my class on ‘Media, Technology and Sociology’ I’ve been mulling over these issues… We’ve done a pretty good job discussing doing hands-on wikis, blogs, audio, and film, but the hybridity of the course makes it all a little too compact. Grr.

It’s a little like the reverse of the digital divide that Attewell and Battle research: they find that when you just throw technology at students those who have the cultural capital to use them excel and those who don’t, don’t–further exaggerating inequalities and masking them in a techno-utopic vision… can the flip be said about faculty? I could be wrong but that classroom looked HUGE, and I wonder if diminishing class size rather than adding the expectations of techno-wizardry would have a larger impact on a class like that. Whoosh. And I’m wondering about how to be more effective in folding over media-criticism, reflexivity on media/technology and sociology, while also doing hands-on workshops with these technologies… With 21 students. Any more than that, and the transaction costs are too large…

On related notes of technology in the classroom, Erik Olin Wright podcasts all of his lectures here. Discussion of the use of ‘clickers’ at Scatterplot here. It makes me think that I may want to work on creating movies for the use of technology so that students can learn these things outside the classroom… Maybe over the summer.