Activity 6.4 Broadcast or communicative
From the list below:
- a learning management system
- a blog
- online collaborative learning
- Second Life
- a podcast
- an open textbook
1. Determine which is a medium and which a technology, or which could be both, and under what conditions.
| learning management system | either: technology as software, medium when used for course delivery |
| blog | medium (WordPress or other blog software is the technology) |
| online collaborative learning | medium |
| either, but mainly a medium | |
| Second Life | medium |
| podcast | medium |
| open textbook | medium |
2. Decide where, from your experience, each medium or technology should be placed on Figure 6.4.3. Write down why.
3. Which were easy to categorize and which difficult?
Difficult:
- online collaborative learning, because it is highly communicative but the teacher has a good deal of control over the medium
- Twitter, because it is definitely under the control of the learner, but it is also as much a broadcast as a communicative medium.
With both these, I gave more importance to the broadcast/communicative dimension compared with the control dimension.