Amish Technology
Choosing Well: Technology in Curriculum
Choosing Well: Technology in Curriculum
Communication 2 Tuesday, May 20th, 2008With the exception of the development of robots, technology is all about the communication, delivery, and manipulation of information. As I mentioned in the first Communication installment, the types of communication both available to us and in use is mind boggling. I want to un-boggle my mind. Getting a grasp on what exactly we are doing with technology should be extremely useful in discovering what developments and products can be useful in education, and which products are just a waste of time (fun or not fun). So what I plan to do for the next several installment of this blog is tease apart the conceptual components of the technology we are currently using. So far I've settled on three major concepts: Communication, Delivery, and Manipulation of information. For this installment I'll examine and describe Communication. Manipulation will addressed in the next installment, and Delivery in the third since it applies to both Communication and Manipulation of information. Currently, communication can be broken down into 3 major categories: text, image, and audio. Text is basically just... text, and it's the most basic building block on the Internet. Text can be further broken down into at least 2 categories I'll call Conversational and Record. Conversational Text is the kind of stuff you'll find on cell phone text messages and the popular website, http://icanhascheezburger.com/. It's beginning to creep in to the other kind of text communication, Record Text. Record text is everything typed in full written English, or any other language. I call it Record text because everything written on the Internet is a matter of public record. Putting something on the public record used to be the nearly exclusive domain of public servants and people who worked in the mass media, but now we all add to the public record multiple times daily in many ways. Images followed text in technology very quickly. I subdivided images in to two categories that each have their own categories. Those first two categories are Still Images and Motion Images. Still Images can be further broken down into Photographs and Graphics; Motion Images can be broken down into Video and Graphics. Examples of Still Image Photographs abound on the web, and examples of Still Image Graphics are ubiquitous. Look at the top of this web page, Still Image Graphics are arrayed in a row. YouTube is perhaps the most famous collection point for Motion Image Video; it's the stuff people do with video cameras. A good example of Motion Image Graphics are animated GIFs most often used by advertisers on web pages. Most any newspaper's web site will have one or more animated GIFs on its home page. Finally we have audio. I've broken audio down into two categories, mirroring text, Record and Conversation. Conversational Audio is meant to be momentary and ephemeral. It may convey important messages like, "Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!" But this communication is not meant to be recorded and saved. This type of audio communication happens via land line telephones, cell phones, Voice Over Internet Protocol telephony, and products like Skype. It may end up getting recorded, but that is not the intent of the people engaging in the conversation. Record Audio is all types of audio meant to be recorded, whether it is for the public record or private enjoyment. Music, oratory, and instruction can all be recorded and reused or enjoyed later. To be sure, all of these forms of communication can be combined. A great example of the combination of these types of communication is at the NASA web site: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/index.html. The Phoenix Mars Lander video is an especially good example. Until next time... Daniel  Flag as inappropriateComments No comments have been left for this entry.Leave a comment This K12HSN blog does not allow anonymous comments.
| | Search
Categories General (9) Popular Tags Most Recent Budget Impasse Monday, August 11th, 2008 Drooling Thursday, July 31st, 2008 Cool stuff and Where I Find It Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 Communication 2 Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 Trends in Adoption of Technology Monday, May 12th, 2008 |
