Visiting With Aoki Sensei

Sunday, 3-6-2011

We had a very good class visit with Aoki Sensei from Japan this past Thursday. Aoki Sensei talked to us about an international colloquium that they sponsored at her school and presented the controversial thoughts of one of its speakers who is a computer scientist: 1) technologies change quickly; 2)technologies need to learn us; and 3) there are too many technologies.

Additionally, these ideas were presented:
Hard technologies are those technologies that are single purpose and inflexible. They are easy to use. The example given was a rice cooker, although I disagree. My rice cooker can do about eight different things and I have to press several buttons to get it to cook plain white rice. I think a better example would be an audio cassette tape player. Put the tape in, press > to play.

Soft technologies are those technologies which have a lot of flexibility in them and with some programming skills could be used to do several things. I suppose a soft technology is a computer? You can use it to word process, edit video, store pictures, surf the web, etc.

Digital versus analogue literacies. My understanding of this now is that analogue literacies are one-to-one so for every technology, there would be one-to-one learning involved. For example, Frank shared with us learning to ride a bicycle would be an analogue literacy. My example would be learning to use a toaster.

Digital literacy, on the other hand, is much more difficult and controversial to define, especially since scholars from many different fields are looking at this notion and use different terminologies. In the library field, for example, we call it information literacy. In the information and computer science field, they probably call it something different.

Our breakout group session was excellent. Our group was Tom, Myla, Dean and myself. The three questions we were asked to respond to were:
1)Do you agree with the author's implicit statement that digital literacies are not necessary? Why? Our group did not totally agree with this statement. We felt that digital literacies are necessary in the area of learning applications such as MS Office and also in order to validate information on the web.

We also discussed the fact that generationally, students are actually teaching teachers technology these days. Some teachers are resistant to technology or unable to move with the speed of technology.

2)What is the role of the educational technologist?
Our group felt the educational technologist's role is to not get stuck on the technology but to be fluid and flexible. To find out what the goal is and to help teachers to craft the best outcome possible.

Tom discussed how he works with faculty who get so caught up in using PowerPoint that they might lose sight of their message. I shared how I often just take in flip chart paper and colorful pens to a meeting and get the participants up out of their chairs and participating in order to create a stakeholder record. We talked about the interesting observation that sometimes stakeholders will say one thing and write down another on the flipchart which then makes them have to clarify what they mean which creates better understanding for all. I think, depending on the intent of the meeting, this results in much better communication. I hardly use PP at all anymore, maybe once a year during annual report to the whole library time.

Aloha, Kim