Morphology :: MOO Teaching Technology Education Essays

MorphologyEverything we experience immediately in the mode of a limit, or as foreign, or as intolerable will have returned to the serenity of the unequivocal. And whatever currently designates this exteriority to us may well bingle day designate us. Only the riddle of this exteriority will remain --- Michel FoucaultIf the architecture of MOOs replicates real-life places like schoolrooms, we can be assured that real-life problems exist there, too. Educators need to be aware of how and in what forms these problems take get on downslope, in addition to knowing how to handle them. It is not easy to get wind answers in the mountains of popular culture hype and mass media reports on the Internet. Depending on what magazines and newspapers you read, Internet technology is either the salvation or the demise of civilization. sure as shooting the rapid growth of access to the Internet has parents and educators wringing their hands over how to shelter children and students online from some of the same dangers they face in the physical world. Yet one of the most encouraging aspects of the growth and scope of the Internet is the opportunity for tout ensemble of us to contribute to the social construction of ethical guidelines in the ripening and intent of Internet-based technologies in educational settings.thither is a fine line between giving students the latitude to be creative online and setting them utter with no ethical boundaries whatsoever. Just as in traditional classroom settings, common sense and proper preparation go a commodious management toward anticipating problems and resolving them. It is not necessary to blame the whole of net profit and thereby throw the virtual baby out with the virtual bathwater. There are ways to manage the fluidity associated with identity, speed, and open access on the Internet. We need to avoid the rhetoric of negative cyber-hyper and engage instead in productive discussion about the Internet in terms of its positiv e impact on individual and collective lives. Especially with respect to the use of Internet technology in education, we should do so rhetorically, going slowly, doing our homework, so to speak, before we make claims about the dangers of the Internet.Secondly, and perhaps less metaphorically, real-time article of faith also creates real-time homework for instructors. The MOO will change the way you relate to your students, and teachers may decree that they must give up their principle orientation toward the individual student (Porter). Teletechnology mixes new modes of intelligibility (and new codes of behavior) with new pedagogical contracts between teacher and student, and it also effectively outs the faculty in ways that they may find unnerving.