#edcmooc Final Assignment, Thoughts & Artefact

For my final assignment I resurrected and finished an old project, which sadly had been parked on my unfinished projects graveyard. I am happy to finally give it a life!
For me it represents my thoughts about technology, learning and the future. I think technology drives history and social change, but still we decide the ultimate direction. We are not helpless and technology is not pressured on us by an "alien" force, because without us there wouldn't be technology in the first place. It's important to encourage a lively public discussion about what all these innovations mean for humanity in a very large and wide context. Only through this public discussion will we be able to decide which unwanted consequences we are prepared to pay and which not. Science and technology can be incredible useful for humanity, but all the controversies of today also remind me of a poem by Goethe called:

"Der Zauberlehrling" (The Sorcerer's Apprentice)

You can read The Sorcerer's Apprentice , as well as other all encompassing technologies like genetics or an internet that destroys every safe place for our privacy, in two ways:
First:
Some things are too powerful to mess with, if you don't have mastery about them - meaning having thought about all the consequences and what to do about them.
And Second:
Lying can be seen as willingly obscuring half of of the truth, but if you call this magical power you can never be sure or get rid of the consequences. (which reminds me of metaphors and how science and advertisement often encourage one sided ways to think about certain topics)

I think technology can solve a lot of humanities problems, but we have to stop closing our eyes for the not so beautiful consequences. Only if we can ponder and discuss the whole big picture, we can over come our fears, find solutions and work in the right direction. Utopia for me still is the right direction, but to pursue it we have to dream consciously, knowing about the problems we need to solve, which is actually quite hard work and not easy at all.




Please press the HD button and head over to vimeo to see the video in High Definition!

#edcmooc, #videos, #utopia,


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