Edudemic

Topics: berkman, edtech, harvard, professionals, yochai benkler

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Studying Web culture and learning, I feel like I’m on the cusp of something big, and futuristic and important.  It’s like the space race of the 1950s, only instead of looking to outer space, celestial bodies, and distant life forms, we are peering into cyberspace, information, and our selves.  In this new era of exploration, we still walk the dangerous line between crashing into black holes of mediated entertainment and instant digital gratification, or, on the other hand, discovering exciting new spaces and liberating possibilities.  Whether we are in space or on Facebook, the exploration of human limits always exists in a tension between these two possible realities: apocalypse and apotheosis.  And this is exactly what has lured me to learning and technology.

One challenge in this new, interdisciplinary and interprofessional field, however, is the lack of a common theoretical canon.  Most physicists will be familiar with Einstein, Kepler, and the laws of thermodynamics.  Cultural theorists will all have read Baudrillard, Lacan, and Derrida, or at least be familiar with their theoretical underpinnings.  In these fields, new knowledge is built upon these foundational works, disproving them in some cases, but giving thinkers a common frame of reference for how to consider of the world in these terms.

"The Wealth Of Networks" by Yochai Benkler

Technology specialists, educational practitioners, parents and students, on the other hand, tend to understand Web culture from a hodgepodge of popular, formal and informal perspectives.  There seems to be no cohesive, agreed-upon set of texts from which new theories of Web culture and educational technology can grow.

While these foundational texts are still emerging, I have created a list of the most influential resources on Web technology that define the EdTech domain for me.  It is by no means an exhaustive list of works in this domain, but I have found them invaluable for framing all other research and experience I’ve had working with technology in educational settings.

• Yochai Benkler’s Wealth Of Networks is a dense but lucid overview of how the Internet is changing the economy, politics, and culture in the “networked public sphere.”

• Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everyone discusses how the lowering of “transaction costs” is changing group formation and collaborative production in the networked world.

• Henry Jenkins’ White Paper, “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” provides a critical overview of participatory culture and the “new media ecology.”

• Danah boyd’s research on the Internet and youth provides important insights into how young people are using Web technologies to “write themselves into being” (PDF) in the contemporary world.

• While Cory Doctorow’s work are not exactly empirical research, his fiction and internet publications have informed a lot of how I see Web culture unfolding in the future.  Less of a formal researcher, Doctorow embodies the modern, networked thinker.
  

  "Understanding Privacy" by Daniel Solove

• Etienne Wenger’s “Communities of Practice” explores the notion of how people learn as part of a group or community.  Wenger’s definition of, and ethnographic experiences with communities of practice is a good theoretical framework to think about online communities and groups.

• Daniel Solove’s “Understanding Privacy” presents an interesting taxonomy of privacy for a networked society where people exchange personal data for goods and services on the edge of a surveillance culture.

What texts do you see as being essential reads for 21st century educators?  What are good sources from the technology skeptics point of view (I’ve been meaning to read more Postman and Lanier…)?