#EDCMOOC Week 2: Looking at the future

Hello again! I didn't write any entry last week (though I was posting at the forums and social networks, as I was travelling during the weekend, I didn't have the time to write in the blog).

I liked having a core reading about the metaphors of the Internet for week 2. As a Communications student, I've read a lot about metaphors and I really like Lakoff and Johnson's work, on which Johnston's text is based. I do believe metaphors are powerful because they shape the way we think about us and the world and, thus, the way we act.

Let's think about technology. In Sight, the metaphor depicting technology is that it (as well as life) is just a game. There's no doubt games can be fun and a useful tool for learning. But, as Jamie Leigh McDaniel says in one of the forums, "maybe what a game does is isolate one goal or objective we might have in life and allow us to work towards that goal without being distracted by other considerations, or the real complexity of our experience.The Sight Guy chops the cucumber, he doesn't think about his hunger, the taste or smell of the food. He plays his Dating Game, he doesn't think about the woman as a free and autonomous being. We play Monopoly and try and amass money, we don't think about the moral implications of the global distribution of wealth." In a similar way, metaphors help us to understand life by comparing new things to other thinks we already know. It justs isolates some characteristics while it forgets about others.  But that comparison is never complete or completely accurate. In some ways, life is similar to a game, but not in others. By making the world easier to understand, metaphors can be helpful, but they can also make us see the world from a simplistic point of view and even confuse us.

In Charlie 13, technologies are means of control. Charlie needs to expell the chip out of his body to be free. But can technology also set us free? What about this video? Can a car --a technological device-- help us break out of an artificial, unhuman world and into reality? Can technology help us to learn and set us free from the boundaries of paid education? Not always, not completely... As any other metaphor, 'technology is freedom' or 'technology is control' are partial and limited.

I would say it's not about technology, but about the way we use it, but that would be thinking of tech as neutral. Technology does use us at the same time we use it. And in this creative and sometimes confusing interaction (with technology and with others through technology), learning might ocurr. As Gardner Campbell says, "Beyond access and cost, 'open education' shouldn't be just 'open', but 'opening'."