Unit 1 Portfolio

From Pencils To Pixels by Dennis Baron brought up some interesting topics that are rarely ever thought about in a normal day. He discusses the Innovation and progression behind many modern tools and practices. An intriguing point Baron made in this piece was the identification of pencils as a complex technology. It was no simple process getting the Pencil to where it is today. There was a lot of work that needed to go into the physical production of the pencil and it had to go through multiple changes before it became the pencil we know today. At first, just like any other new unused technology or invention, the pencil had some trouble getting accepted. The examples with both the calculator and spell check were also crucial to his main argument. When they came out, there was tons of criticism surrounding the new technologies but in time they got accepted as a necessity. "Regardless of the value parents and teachers still place on knowing math facts, calculators are now indispensable in math class"(Baron). Teachers thought calculators would restrict kids from learning to do math but now in any math related classroom or job a calculator is crucial. Baron analyzed cases that I hadn’t really considered in the past and I am glad I read this piece to get a better understanding of the argument. It really allowed the reader to get a better appreciation of the tools we have accessible today, but also what we have had in the past.

The second source I used was a New York Post article written by Mike Wehner called Researchers trained robots to write poetry. The article explores Artificial Intelligence and the ability of Robots to perform Human tasks. Researchers in Australia developed an algorithm capable of writing poetry, and the results are pretty amazing.  The robot was fed “nearly 3,000 sonnets as training, and the algorithm tore them apart to teach itself how the words worked with each other"(Wehner). After analyzing and piecing together all the information, the robot was able to create some poems on its own. Most of the created poems were very well put together and sounded as if they had come from a human writer. In fact, when the bot’s verses were mixed with human-written poems participants were split 50-50 over who wrote them.[1]  This article really shed light on how intelligent artificial intelligence is becoming. Something like poetry would be one of the last places where I’d expect robots to interfere, but it seems as if that’s becoming a reality. The author’s project was no more than sharing these discoveries with the audience but he does it in a well-orchestrated manner. He gets the reader interested by discussing the significant strides that AI has taken and transitions that into the discussion of robot poetry. This article perfectly fits into the conversation of writing and technology because technology is now beginning to create writing which is already a technology in itself.

The third source I chose was the Ted talk we watched in class “From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able” given by Michael Wesch. I found it very intriguing how Wesch organized his speech as he did it in a fashion that really sucked in the viewer. The genre of this piece is really just a TED talk where he is trying to get a point across and to advocate change. He started his talk off by relating today’s society to an Aztec story of the entire world being on fire, mentioning that we are in a time of social unrest, economic crises, and that we cannot continue to live the way that we have been living. He then dove into the discussion of technology and media. When the television was initially introduced it entirely changed how we went about our lives as humans. Our conversations were “controlled by the few and designed for the masses” (Wesch), we had no voice as a population. Today however, new media has entirely changed this whole concept, it is no longer a one way conversation. Through multiple examples Wesch shows that we now have more of a voice than ever and we can create change through this new media platform. He says we need to go beyond just teaching critical thinking in the classrooms as we need to adapt to and accept that media is the future. Overall, it should be noted that Technology taking over can be incredibly beneficial for society if we change our ways and use media to contribute and impact todays world.

The fourth source that I analyzed is a piece I discovered on Purdue University’s website under Learning Design and Technology program resources. The work is titled How Has Technology Changed Education and that’s pretty much exactly what is discussed in it. The beginning focuses on a 14^th century painting of a university lecture and it brings up many similarities to teaching today. There was a teacher in the front of the room lecturing to students, some who were following alone but others looking bored and tired and some distracted in a book. This dynamic is still the same today, except the book is perhaps an iPhone or laptop.

            The paper then shifts to discuss what impact technology really has had on the progression of teaching and learning. The teacher is no longer the only source of information for students, as there is a whole world of information at our fingertips these days. People from all across the world can collaborate with each other. As the author sums it perfectly “The walls of the classrooms are no longer a barrier as technology enables new ways of learning, communicating, and working collaboratively”(Purdue).

            This paper did an excellent job at emphasizing the power technology has as a tool in transforming learning as we know it. The reader is able to get a better understanding of why technology is so crucial in education today. Although the beginning tries to relate education from hundreds of years ago to today, in reality Technology has entirely revolutionized education.

Baron, Dennis. (1999). From pencils to pixels: The stages of literacy technologies. In Gail E. Hawisher & Cynthia L. Selfe (Eds.), Passions, pedagogies, and 21st century technologies (pp. 15–33). 

“Digital Ethnography.” Digital Ethnography, 18 June 2014, mediatedcultures.net/presentations/from-knowledgeable-to-knowledge-able/.

“How Has Technology Changed Education?” Purdue University Online, 25 Apr. 2017, online.purdue.edu/ldt/learning-design-technology/resources/how-has-technology-changed-education.

Wehner, Mike. “Researchers Trained Robots to Write Poetry.” New York Post, New York Post, 9 Aug. 2018, nypost.com/2018/08/08/researchers-trained-robots-to-write-poetry/.

---

[1] Wehner 1