Moving onto Unit 2 – week one

Hi everyone,

I hope you had a great weekend, and that you enjoyed doing some background research on people who have had an influence on the field. It is now time to turn our attention to Unit 2!

Before we do, just a reminder that Assignment 1 was due last night. If you haven’t yet submitted it to the Moodle dropbox and your blog, please do so as soon as you can. While I can't read them all at the same time, I do have time blocked this week to review them and provide feedback so will be working away on that over the course of this week. 

On to Unit 2: Every field has debates and researchers who disagree with one another and negotiate their understanding of how the world works. Science is iterative, and it changes over time, as we learn more, as cultures change, as technology changes, as our understanding of people and the natural world changes.  Some debates are resolved, and new ones arise. Others continue. And in some cases, while debates are resolved, there may be individuals who believe otherwise, who either intentionally or unintentionally continue on supporting unsubstantiated claims and myths.

But what does all this have to do with a nice and solution-oriented field like educational technology? Nice fields have debates, disagreements, quarrels, and myths too. Come to think of it, we have our fair share of them! In this unit, we'll explore a few of those, and we will start with the great media debate. Please review the unit description, and identify a partner to work with for the next 3 weeks. There are 10 of you, so we should be able to get 5 teams of 2. Feel free to use the student discussion forum to identify others to work with if you need to or the google doc sign up sheet.

Please also review assignment 2. To add some flexibility to the course and allow for exploration of personal topics of interest, I integrated our exploration of debates and myths into this assignment. Weeks 5 and 6 will essentially be "work weeks" where you'll engaging with assignment 2.

I hope you have a great rest of the week - let's see who is right, who is wrong, who is somewhat right/wrong, and try to figure out if our field has myths and ideas that are plain wrong but – like zombies - refuse to die. Ha!

Have a great week!
Ciao,

Elizabeth