I have just sent a rough draft of my manuscript on Korean ubiquitous society vision and the role of education in it to the editor and will wait for feedback. As always, I'm suffering from the acute syndrome of not having done enough but feeling happy about getting rid of the job for a while. Fortunately, I have until the end of January to make changes after hearing from the ed.
Next I will probably write an abstract to Culture Unbound, a new journal that has a special issue of The City coming up. I think I will try writing something about the city as the primus locus in the vision of ubiquitous society.
Synergy is the keyword when writing articles. One foundation of data carries a long way.
Showing posts with label future school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label future school. Show all posts
1.12.08
From scifi to Korean future school
I don't read or watch much of it these days but still I'm a solid fan of science fiction. By scifi I don't mean so much the fantasy oriented stuff like Star Wars or The Fifth Element although they are fun to watch. To me, the real scifi is the hardcore genre represented by Contact (written by Carl Sagan) or 2001: A Space Odyssey (by Arthur C. Clarke).
In my opinion HC scifi is related to anthropology as lots of scifi literature deals with interesting sociocultural configurations albeit in an imagined location (in another planet) and/or in another time (usually the future). I also tend to get a lot of ideas and inspiration from scifi that helps me in my research. Or, could help me if I got around to develop the ideas and make them materialize on paper.
The last piece I read was Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (by Philip K. Dick, filmed as Blade Runner) that described a future society with androids used in the colonization of distant planets. That kind of future might not be so far ahead. Take a look at the BigDog robomule developed for the military by Boston Dynamics or read about the Robot Code of Ethics that is being drawn up by the S. Korean government to prevent the human abuse of robots - and vice versa.
To get to the initial point that prompted me to write this... as I posted before, I'm in the middle of writing a chapter about the school of future in Korea. In other words I'm trying to figure out what going to school will be like in 30 t0 50 years from now in Korea. Today I watched a video about Cyber Home Learning System developed in Korea. In addition to enhancing the quality of public education, the system was (and is being) built to cut down private tutoring expenses and reduce education gap.
It is widely known that Koreans are big spenders on private tutoring, and private teaching makes up a big proportion of education in general, which makes most learning in Korea to be somewhat an elite hobby. No money means half the teaching. However, the Cyber Home Learning System is meant to alleviate the problem as it is (and will be) cheaper to get the software and use the system than to pay for private tutoring.
A student would access the system at home and study by him/herself. This fits the general Korean vision of future education, emphasizing individualization and domestication of learning (see an article about it). Whether this is a desirable path or not is beside the point here. In my opinion it is just another step towards the future network society where a significantly larger proportion of our lives happens on the net. It will surely change our culture and our experience of being social - as it has already. Such interesting times for an anthropologist!
Together with the development of nanotechnology, implant hardware, virtual software, massive "googleization", cybernetics etc. the future life of a online human will be so different that contemporary scifi and transhuman visions might turn out to be hopelessly lame and conservative. Uploading, sharing and downloading consciousnesses, copy-pasting them into cybernetic organisms, creating "googles of consciousness" may be only a prelude to a way more scifi future. The sweet thing is that we have no idea.
Today, I imagined a Korean elementary school pupil of the future, hooked into a learning software in his room, downloading data about the world into his mind, meeting his friends online and perhaps a few times a month or a year actually doing something with them in "meatspace" instead of cyberspace. What will "really meeting" someone mean in the future, when almost everything is online, when we meet our friends in the future facebooks and twitters, interact with people mostly virtually. Surely this is not a new question and others also have thought if "meatspace" dates will be considered as primitive, suspicious, conservative and even less authentic.
However, the future school of Korea, the kid in his home learning center, reminded me of Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun published in 1957. In the novel there is a planet called Solaria where people are virtually hermits and don't meet each other physically. Even the idea of meeting someone face-to-face is considered as repulsive or disrupting intimacy. However, the Solarians do spend their social time chatting with the hologram representations of their friends. And when the Solarians are young, the are allowed to interact with other kids in meatspace but are given a designated location of solitude when they reach a certain age. In their own quarters they spend their time learning, working, interacting with friends in holograms and being served by robots - and panicking if they happen to really meet someone.
Asimov was pretty witty already 50 years ago.
In my opinion HC scifi is related to anthropology as lots of scifi literature deals with interesting sociocultural configurations albeit in an imagined location (in another planet) and/or in another time (usually the future). I also tend to get a lot of ideas and inspiration from scifi that helps me in my research. Or, could help me if I got around to develop the ideas and make them materialize on paper.
The last piece I read was Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (by Philip K. Dick, filmed as Blade Runner) that described a future society with androids used in the colonization of distant planets. That kind of future might not be so far ahead. Take a look at the BigDog robomule developed for the military by Boston Dynamics or read about the Robot Code of Ethics that is being drawn up by the S. Korean government to prevent the human abuse of robots - and vice versa.
To get to the initial point that prompted me to write this... as I posted before, I'm in the middle of writing a chapter about the school of future in Korea. In other words I'm trying to figure out what going to school will be like in 30 t0 50 years from now in Korea. Today I watched a video about Cyber Home Learning System developed in Korea. In addition to enhancing the quality of public education, the system was (and is being) built to cut down private tutoring expenses and reduce education gap.
It is widely known that Koreans are big spenders on private tutoring, and private teaching makes up a big proportion of education in general, which makes most learning in Korea to be somewhat an elite hobby. No money means half the teaching. However, the Cyber Home Learning System is meant to alleviate the problem as it is (and will be) cheaper to get the software and use the system than to pay for private tutoring.
A student would access the system at home and study by him/herself. This fits the general Korean vision of future education, emphasizing individualization and domestication of learning (see an article about it). Whether this is a desirable path or not is beside the point here. In my opinion it is just another step towards the future network society where a significantly larger proportion of our lives happens on the net. It will surely change our culture and our experience of being social - as it has already. Such interesting times for an anthropologist!
Together with the development of nanotechnology, implant hardware, virtual software, massive "googleization", cybernetics etc. the future life of a online human will be so different that contemporary scifi and transhuman visions might turn out to be hopelessly lame and conservative. Uploading, sharing and downloading consciousnesses, copy-pasting them into cybernetic organisms, creating "googles of consciousness" may be only a prelude to a way more scifi future. The sweet thing is that we have no idea.
Today, I imagined a Korean elementary school pupil of the future, hooked into a learning software in his room, downloading data about the world into his mind, meeting his friends online and perhaps a few times a month or a year actually doing something with them in "meatspace" instead of cyberspace. What will "really meeting" someone mean in the future, when almost everything is online, when we meet our friends in the future facebooks and twitters, interact with people mostly virtually. Surely this is not a new question and others also have thought if "meatspace" dates will be considered as primitive, suspicious, conservative and even less authentic.
However, the future school of Korea, the kid in his home learning center, reminded me of Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun published in 1957. In the novel there is a planet called Solaria where people are virtually hermits and don't meet each other physically. Even the idea of meeting someone face-to-face is considered as repulsive or disrupting intimacy. However, the Solarians do spend their social time chatting with the hologram representations of their friends. And when the Solarians are young, the are allowed to interact with other kids in meatspace but are given a designated location of solitude when they reach a certain age. In their own quarters they spend their time learning, working, interacting with friends in holograms and being served by robots - and panicking if they happen to really meet someone.
Asimov was pretty witty already 50 years ago.
28.11.08
What's up in my research?
Hello Blogosphere!
As this is my first post in this blog, I will go on to tell about my current research activities. As a sidenote I'm happy to say that working as a post-doctoral researcher in my department has been surprisingly research-oriented. I have had enough time to concentrate on research, excluding odd cases as a lecturer.
At the moment I am working on a book chapter about the future of school in Korean ubiquitous society (read abstract here). South Korea is one of the leading IT societies of the world and has firm plans to create u-Korea, and education is, obviously, an essential part of that vision. I'm not so much writing about the tech stuff or about teaching methods per se as trying to imagine a future Neo-Confucian Korean society filled with technology and how the combination would affect the culture or the whole meaning of teaching/education.
I'm almost done with the draft and will post it here for potential comments on December 10th at the latest. Roberto Muffoletto, the editor of the volume (going with the name Breaking the Classroom Walls), has given the writers the liberty to use their imagination, so I'm glad to do something a little bit different from strict academic writing.
After exploring future Korea I'm hoping to have the time to write a manuscript for the new Journal of Global Mass Communication special issue: Media, globalization and the postcolony. I'm not exactly sure what I will write about, but I think it will have something to do with the symbolism of Japan and Korea relations, involving the rhetoric describing the colonial past.
After the New Year I will sort of continue on the same theme and start typing away a conference paper (see abstract) focusing on Dokdo, a small island in the East Sea or Sea of Japan. The Korean ownership of the island is disputed by Japan which has caused a lot of political turmoil and exchange of spicy rhetoric between the media and governments of the two countries. My plan is to study how Dokdo is used in Korean cyberspace to reconstruct Korean history and national identity for international audience.
As for the plans for spring 2009, I'm hoping to write about ubiquitous society visions, global trends in new media and, time willing, co-edit a volume about Korean new media. I'm also waiting to see my article (co-authored with Marika Paaso) titled "Finns Making Sense of Korean Hierarchy" published in the Journal of Migration and Society and a chapter titled "Keeping in Touch" (about Korean youth and their mobile comm. culture) in an edited volume published by Finnish Youth Research Society.
You can see a selected compilation of my published research here.
As this is my first post in this blog, I will go on to tell about my current research activities. As a sidenote I'm happy to say that working as a post-doctoral researcher in my department has been surprisingly research-oriented. I have had enough time to concentrate on research, excluding odd cases as a lecturer.
At the moment I am working on a book chapter about the future of school in Korean ubiquitous society (read abstract here). South Korea is one of the leading IT societies of the world and has firm plans to create u-Korea, and education is, obviously, an essential part of that vision. I'm not so much writing about the tech stuff or about teaching methods per se as trying to imagine a future Neo-Confucian Korean society filled with technology and how the combination would affect the culture or the whole meaning of teaching/education.
I'm almost done with the draft and will post it here for potential comments on December 10th at the latest. Roberto Muffoletto, the editor of the volume (going with the name Breaking the Classroom Walls), has given the writers the liberty to use their imagination, so I'm glad to do something a little bit different from strict academic writing.
After exploring future Korea I'm hoping to have the time to write a manuscript for the new Journal of Global Mass Communication special issue: Media, globalization and the postcolony. I'm not exactly sure what I will write about, but I think it will have something to do with the symbolism of Japan and Korea relations, involving the rhetoric describing the colonial past.
After the New Year I will sort of continue on the same theme and start typing away a conference paper (see abstract) focusing on Dokdo, a small island in the East Sea or Sea of Japan. The Korean ownership of the island is disputed by Japan which has caused a lot of political turmoil and exchange of spicy rhetoric between the media and governments of the two countries. My plan is to study how Dokdo is used in Korean cyberspace to reconstruct Korean history and national identity for international audience.
As for the plans for spring 2009, I'm hoping to write about ubiquitous society visions, global trends in new media and, time willing, co-edit a volume about Korean new media. I'm also waiting to see my article (co-authored with Marika Paaso) titled "Finns Making Sense of Korean Hierarchy" published in the Journal of Migration and Society and a chapter titled "Keeping in Touch" (about Korean youth and their mobile comm. culture) in an edited volume published by Finnish Youth Research Society.
You can see a selected compilation of my published research here.
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