I think we are off to a really good start in this course. We’ve covered some of the basics in relation to the main themes (Persons, Moral Values, and the Good Life); we’re getting used to the kinds of questions we will be mulling over throughout the course; and the level of interest and enthusiasm seems to be pretty high at this point. I hope we can keep that up as the weeks get longer, the excitement of just being here begins to fade a bit, and the material we are covering gets slightly more challenging.
I am learning a lot about you through our conversations, and I’m having a great time watching these videos. You’re impressing me with the level of serious thought, creativity, insight, and humor that you are bringing to this discussion. (I’ve been told that I shouldn’t expect such things from a generation of young people raised on video games, text messages, YouTube, and social networks. I didn’t really believe them, of course, but I’m certainly glad to have such convincing proof that ‘kids these days’ are still capable of entering into the kind of weighty discussions we like to have around here.) Coming out of class today, I’ll say I’m glad that I asked each of you take stock of what we have done so far and give me feedback. I’m especially glad that I had you do it in a way that allowed you to choose various media for expressing yourselves, and that now allows all of us to benefit from the time and effort each of you have put in. I hope you will agree that the project was worthwhile, despite whatever challenges and set-backs may have made you question my judgment along the way.
Next week, we are going to expand on the general themes we have begun to consider by focusing a bit more on a topic that is, not surprisingly, coming up quite a bit in our discussion; i.e., life in a digital age. I don’t think it is much of a stretch to say that we are living through an historical period that is bringing with it some changes in how we communicate, think, collaborate, and disseminate our ideas that are nothing short of revolutionary. The models of literacy, learning, and authorship that grew to prominence following the introduction of the printing press are becoming increasingly questionable in an age that involves entirely different tools for producing, sharing, archiving, and accessing the information we make use of in our individual and collective pursuits of knowledge.
My ‘generation’ and the ‘half-generations’ preceding and following it have been largely responsible for figuring out how to make these tools work on such a large scale (in part, paradoxically enough, by discovering how to scale down the physical size of the tools themselves, while simultaneously ramping up their power beyond anything we had previously thought was possible). Your ‘generation’ is now inheriting the advantages and the burdens of their having become, simply, ‘how we do things’. If you expect that any of us had the chance to consider adequately what the long-term effects of these changes might be prior to signing off on their use, well… We sure are glad that your having grown up with them has made you smart enough, productive enough, and reflective enough concerning their use that you can figure these things out on your own! So… Good luck! (Oh, and please do report back to us concerning your progress on these vital issues.)
I’ll plan to get things started by outlining for you some of my own interests in addressing specific challenges we confront in a digital age. I’ll also introduce the notion of ‘ethical literacy’ that provides the framework for some of my research and course design interests, and I’ll lay out some reasons for thinking that the capacities that make up this kind of literacy can help us to address some of the challenges we face as the general conception of literacy that we have relied on for several centuries now is being transformed.
From there, I will be asking you to find some of the further content for our discussion by looking around on the web, sharing what you find with others via the blog, and providing both summaries of and commentary on what is being said there about the challenges we will be discussing.
Until then, please be sure to watch as many of the great videos posted by your classmates as you can, and to give your peers the feedback they deserve in the form of comments and questions that serve to further our discussion (oh, and don’t forget to take the online survey linked to here).
I’m sure that Independence Day will have a slightly different meaning for many of you this year…. Enjoy!
