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Part of me shared this because I felt excited that there is a woman in the real life position of Q, a very cool techie character in the films but also there is a small part of me wanting to make people see that hey look, this is still such a big deal that it makes a news story. Women in technology is still not the norm.

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I was lucky enough to get to have a look at a new initiative for the university today, a room specifically dedicated to creativity and creation using digital technology.

So often we hear stories of revolutionary technology and the impact it will make, but all too often that tech is priced out of the hands of the average person or even average educationalist so it was exciting today to wonder what our students and staff could and indeed would do now that they can easily use a 3D printer, 3D scanner and much much more.

I know at art we’ve already been involved in using this space to help students get creative in product design, what’s next? What can happen when we give people access to awe-inspiring technology instead of mediocre?

 

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Tweet! Cyberpunk

Just a bit of fun this week as I was testing out google glass or google glasses as they are commonly called for the design informatics department.

It’s common in sci-fi to have cyborgs have some sort of enhanced vision and I thought the google glass was definitely a precursor to that.

My thoughts last week on using virtual reality for classes or rather reliving classes is what made me consider google glass and their potential use as a learning aid. Unfortunately, though, they proved to be all hype and not much substance, so I won’t be adding them to my teaching toolkit just yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dirk’s take on my cyberpunk attempt
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Should Oscar Pistorius’s Prosthetic Legs Disqualify Him from the Olympics?

© ZyMOS. Licensed under wiki commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Evernote.svg

Should Oscar Pistorius’s Prosthetic Legs Disqualify Him from the Olympics?

Scientists debate whether prosthetic legs give Pistorius an unfair advantage in the 400-meter race
By Rose Eveleth on July 24, 2012

Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Erik van Leeuwen
Tags: #mscedc
January 24, 2017 at 12:46PM
Open in Evernote

I came across this article this week and it started me thinking about when technology use crosses the line to becoming an enhancement. As a forty something, I remember not being allowed a calculator in a maths test because calculators were seen as an “enhancement” and not fair on those using their own ability. These days, however, the school provides calculators for use in exams. So are they now seen as tools and no longer an enhancement or something which belittles ability? Or are we now used to these tools and what they allow us to do that we now expect more and therefore the tools have become essential?

As someone with a learning disability, I have heard a lot about “equalising” opportunities, in other words using tools or behaviours to give someone with a disability an equal chance to those without. For me this means I wear coloured glasses or use coloured filters to help me read but could this also be viewed as benefiting from technology and not getting by on my own skills or abilities? With me, it’s a bit more subtle than a paralympic runner wearing blades. Clearly, they would not be able to compete and in some cases even run without the aid of technology so I’m hesitant to accept this technology labeled as an enhancement but if we take this same concept into the classroom, one student with access to an iPad during class and another without. The student with the iPad would clearly have an advantage if they could search the internet, electronic libraries etc to access information where the other student didn’t have access to anything other than their own memory and notes.

 

 

 

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definition of homo faber given by wikipedia

 

 

 

 

Is the only difference that humans can control their environment, apes can’t?

This, in turn, led me to think about the new movie versions of “planet of the apes” and I do genuinely wonder, if apes could communicate across their species and mobilise, would they compete against the human race if the situation arose? Give an ape a gun and let them see a human use it, I bet they’d use it to become dominant in their tribe/group. So how different from humans are they really and what is special about humans, or were we just lucky that we progressed onto technology first?

 

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TWEET! – Film Festival

During the film festival we all commented on how there is always a corporation behind any “future tech” and I wondered, do we consider Mark Zuckerberg and facebook as matching this corporation image of do we not see him as sinister enough?