Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Search serendipity

I have been creating activities for the course "Technology in [and beyond] the classroom" for Spring semester. I am building on resources that Intel provides at its Education site. In Destination America: Our Hope, Our Future, one of the exemplary unit plans that the site provides, I saw parallels with our present situation.

At first, I thought of asking students to complete a parallel assignment choosing an autobiographical perspective or a role. But last night, I thought of another way to frame the activity: Autotechnography. So first thing this morning, I searched Google for autotechnography and found only one hit: Engl 106-xxx, a pdf describing developments of another syllabus associated with Engl 680M: New Media at Purdue. I think they have interesting insights that will serve us well:
This studio goes beyond the traditional seminar model by not only investigating contemporary theories of media and media making but by actively producing new media. Readings and discussion topics will bring up questions such as “What is the New Media?”; “Why blogs, wikis, and podcasting?”; “When did virtual worlds and video games become educational?” and many others.

Alas, I reinvented a concept but it is in the early stages of development. But I also discovered another branch of a distributed professional development community. So, I tried to see whether the term has earlier roots, too. So I searched for technography and got thousands of hits. The one that resonated most with me came from DeKoven at www.deepfun.com. While I think that copy-writing the word is unnecessarily restrictive, the concept is powerful:

We often used tools in this way at CTLT but the video clip explains why the approach may be so effective in some situations. I commented on DeKoven's page at Google Video:
The clip captures the essence of the conflict and its resolution starting at 4:09.

I look forward to using the approach in our course.

1 comment:

SC Spaeth said...

The link in the copy of the comment does not work from the blog but does at Google Video. I thought it should based on earlier work that I did with time-code references. Need to recheck that.