Corning and Microsoft #edcmooc

Okay, both these videos assume a lot about what's going to happen in the future with their products.  I actually found them rather amusing, to be honest.

Points:

1) Everything is sterile.  There is not a speck of dust anywhere.  I can understand that in the hospital environment portrayed in the Cornell ad, but in the other scenarios it seems a little unrealistic to me.  Nothing is ever that clean unless you're in a room designed to be sterile.  And if you have kids, you know nothing stays clean for long.

2) Speaking of which: where are the fingerprints on the glass? We have two tablets at my house, and both are prone to fingerprints almost immediately after I wipe them down.  I would think that after a day of use in the classroom those glass tablets would be coated in them.

As far as utopian vs. dystopian goes, both ads tend to show these utopian views of how their products would be used in education in different manners -- in the Cornell ad, it's completely integrated in to the classroom, with the teacher using all the tools available to her, while in the Microsoft ad the little girl is using it to do her homework.  I don't know how realistic that is, considering that I know quite a few teachers who are technophobes and will only go so far as to use the laptops provided to them to grade.  I'm wondering if in this world all the teachers grew up with this technology so they're more comfortable with it?

As far as how people communicate with each other, most of the communication is over the phone with video phone-type technology, which can be somewhat impersonal.  But considering that "The Jetsons" predicted that we would have similar technology, it's not that far out of what we thought we would have.  Look at Skype, which is a video communication tool.  I use it sometimes to talk with my mother, and my mom is trying to get my brother to sign on to Skype so that we can all talk together.

It's very easy to get caught up in the new technologies, but at the end of the day you still have to think about "What would I use it for?  Why do I need this?"

#edcmooc