Lesson Plan

I have an affinity to History and am considering any Thematic study of relevance of a History lesson from any epoch. A pedagogical approach would allow a critical understanding of the development of that through textual and data base resources.

Tagging - Ideological ?

The question of Social Tagging can be viewed as a direct correlation to ideology. Tagging is not simply an instrumentalist basis for education as the question of who owns and can access technology are important critical features involving education.

Tagging- Democratic ?

The concept of social tagging has within itself an implicit ideal of democratisation of learning and sharing knowledge. This assumption is possible because technological access allows empowering a learner. Tagging operates to allow key words which act as representations of concepts and thus as signifiers of an object represented by meaning and its signification.However, the reality remains that knowledge by virtue of its anthropological basis and by its construct has some hierarchical structure and organisation which tagging may not be able to overcome entirely. As Freire demonstrates, however much the argument for democratisation of learning through dialogical and intersubjective processes, the knowledge structuration is difficult to obliterate. The relation between the human mind and its object of learning operates through schematic processes. The instructor is empowered and in turn seeks to empower the learners.
Social Tagging certainly allows the possibility of empowering learners to seek words which represent some concepts of some representation.The modernist and post-modernist perspectives show that the human individual is an agent is highly individuated and hence operates ever more subjectivity.
The claims of tagging as largely democratic beg to be empirically verified through sociological, pychological and linguistic studies. Social Tagging also involves the critical element of gender, race, cultures and social and economic contexts of human individuals which may be important factors in the consideration of tagging and its potential for an ideal shared democratic platform for meaning. To top it all, there is the question of the ownership of technology and the 'participation gap' which has been engendered on account of the digital world and economies of information.If these fundamental factors are taken into consideration normatively, there is the potential of social tagging to become one of the modes in which objects could be represented meaningfully through cultural and pluralist semiotics and become more meaningful way of representing reality. Afterall learning is an endeavour to seek one's place within the Universe and the world we live in and a democratic ideal of learning where everyone gets an equal chance to make meaning and becoming human.

The Library - Participatory

Question: What is the potential of the Web 2.0 in a radical conception of the Library and School and can these institutions enable the normative possibility of emancipation.The Web 2.0 act as a platform which allows the interconnectivity and interactivity of the proliferated range of content in the World Wide Web. It thus facilitates communication, information sharing, interoperability and collaboration for users, and development of services and applications through social-networking , video-sharing, wikis, blogs and folksonomy sites. In this manner it has become an 'architecture of participation'.Such a participatory architecture has implications for the Library and through employing instructional technologies in Education to enhance learning.
The idea of 'architecture of participation' resonates with Jenkins notion of 'convergence culture'. Jenkins three central concepts 'media convergence', 'participatory culture' and 'collective intelligence' descriptively explain the cultural logic of media and how media congruity has occured.
Similarly The Web 2.0 can be viewed as a convergence culture with a critical function in the Library and for Instructional technologies. The technological and cultural shifts have changed the relationships between technologies, market, genres and audiences to the level in which human communication and learning can be furthered and facilitated.
However, particpation leads to critical questions such as the digital divide. Can every individual access information in the converged borderless culture and hence the idea of 'participation gap'. The 21st Century Library and Schools can address the critical issue of participation and fill the normative role of democratic rights egalitarianism through the concerns of emancipation through education.
It is the Library and Schools central role in enhancing the democratic culture through the technological and cultural shifts affecting communication world wide. The issue of 'participation gap' is crucial therefore to the institutions of culture and learning.

Making Sense of Media Literacy

Both disciplines of education and Information Science would be enhanced through Media Literacy. As Informational and Media technologies mushroom with hastening pace, they could be harnessed to further critical foundations of literacy in Schools and the Library as technologies and literacy both presuppose culture and politics.
McLuhan's argues the centrality of electronic technologies in modern societies having profound social and psychological changes operationally and practically. He likens the complex intertwining of electronic technology and human mediation to a biological system in which the media become an extension of man. Such development is a force which leads to massive differentiation, specialisation and alienation in the Weberian sense and equally powerfully on the evolution of societies unparalleled in history hitherto mechanised by simple mass processes.
The pervasive extent of technologies leads to a complex phenomenon, a 'media event', involving most human activities, leisure, educational or personal mediated through electronically based technologies and Medium.
In my opinion a basis for Media Literacy would be a critical and normative affirmation of the spectrum and diversity of communication which electronic technologies enable. A critical and functional relationship needs to be drawn between societies, individuals and their interaction with technologies as they are governed by complex social, economic, political, capitalist infrastructures and consider their effective literacy merit. Underlying the informational technologal superstructure lays the infrastructure which enables the production of the media messages.
The central question for media literacy is normative, how could media messages be accessed, evaluated, analysed and eventually produced through the Library and School institutions. It bears incidentally upon the learner's education to master these complexities and produce them withn their own cultural, societal and personal literary tradition within a critical pedagogical framework. This idea presupposes understanding technologies and development of educational pedagogy through Freirian perspectives.
As a new field, Media Literacy is replete with diverse educational philosophies and goals centrally bound by common educational interest, critical outlook and production of media (Hobbs). Its scope is based on constructivist foundation; awareness of socio-economic, political, historical and aesthetic context; the science of hermeneutics; a linguistic framework which reflects the diverise langauge forms, genres and symbolic systems of communication; and prompts the comprehension of social reality.
Hobbs enumerates its tenets within a Freirian critical framework whose key issues are deliberated in Media Literacy. These principles provide a critical foundation for the inquiry based field of Media Literacy. It engages with the racial, gender or class disparities; civic consciousness, commodification of culture and personal growth.It underlines the phenomenological mode of human experience as fundamental and employing its education tools through creativity, empowerment, collaboration and ethics. It provides validity to popular culture and its texts, whose ideology could be deconstructed.
Central to it all is the autonomous learner and her subjectivity and consciousness. It aims to unravel critically the aesthetics, ideology and political presuppositions underlying literacy.
It assumes the shortfalls of formal school, its conservative nature and instrumentalist approach which could be overcome by Media Literacy pedagogy.
However it is confronted by issues of financial support from Media Institutions. In all a 21st Century educational framework judiciously combines criticism, literacy and the media.

The Medium is the Massage

McLuhan's conceptions about technological development involve complex modernist and structuralist ideas. He employs Weberian differentiation i.e. the fragmentation and bureaucratisation of technological life whose impact if felt through all the levels of human operations and practical life. He thus famously claims that the Medium is the Message meaning that the interaction of these complex structures can only be understood in a total unity of the message and the medium.
The impact of the Medium, an 'extension of ourselves' is both social and psychological, basically scaling up through technology. As technology is scaled up, it demands new and newer roles within the automated processes, as previous roles become redundant.Human relationships themselves are restructured via the machines, both vis a vis others and to oneself.McLuhan distinguishes between the fragmentation of human relationships in machine technology, and the decentralisation and integration of relationships through 'automation technology'.McLuhan extends the structural idea beyond the relationship between the signifier and the signified, to understand the relation of technology and society. He draws an analogy of electric light arguing that a surgery or night sports are inescapably the Medium as they form the "content" of light on the rationale that without light, they cannot take place or even be thought of.

TV, Literature- Ecological and Critical Medium

Reading the fascinating case between Oprah Winfrey and the author Frantzen, as well as Don De Lillo's conception of 'The Barn' teases out important critical moments of relations between media, the media industry, the publishing industry, the questions of gender, race. The frivolities manifested through the Oprah Winfrey TV Show and other elements epitomize a dynamic interplay within two sub strata, the show itself and what goes underneath the Medium.Media ecological and critical insights are helpful to subvert the manifest argument by providing the context and critical focus on the modus operandi of the TV production. The Oprah Winfrey Show is the facade camouflaging layers of technologies, TV network corporate philosophy, publishing industry philosophy, the domination of race, gender political power in the 21st Century both overt and covert, and the programme itself with its interactive TV audience. Thus the TV is a Medium in the McLuhanian sense in which the social dynamics of race, gender, literature and power although seen as a public domain is actually a TV Medium.Adorno's aesthetic theory suggests how aspects of culture e.g. literature and music are experienced through aesthetic modes and the Text, all provide a critical mediation between a subject and the object. His idea of the High and Low cultural artefacts are an ideological critique of the corporate publishing whose guiding force is profits. The authors of the Novel who stake the ground of a High culture and imply the subservient order of the ordinary mass of audience, hold a moral and semiotic presumptuousness of a higher ground.Can a writer fix meaning or elevate his creative Text to a ‘high ground’ obey the rule of hermeneutics? Don De Lillo aptly demonstrates, in a post modern American society, meanings lose their significations about 'The Barn' through post structural semiotics. Baudrillard argues that the cultural signifiers are vastly abundant and absurd in the sense of a ‘hyperreality’, which are employed by corporations and the culture industry to the degree that the relation between the signifiers and the signified is rendered meaningless leaving empty signifiers without referants.In the post structural world combined with 'layers' of technology, corporate media and publishing industries and their ideologically vested interests, power plays through race, gender and the individual herself through the TV culture employing media ecological perspectives. The TV is simply one of the myriad metaphors which demonstrate all the critical fields that form the undercurrents of American culture in which both Oprah and Frantzen are specks.