In the aftermath of ULearn08, Derek Wenmoth’s posted a thoughtful piece on his blog about Twitter, the behaviour of crowds and the affordances of technologies.
We often talk about tools as being instrumental – a means to an end. We should be focused on the teaching and learning and not the tools.
That’s true, but technologies aren’t neutral. The work of Robert Moses, an urban planner in New York city in the mid 20th century, is sometimes used to demonstrate this.
Amongst other things, Moses built highways – curving, landscaped roads intended to be pleasures to drive along and ‘lungs for the city’ connecting the populace to the beaches and parks situated at the ends of those highways.
However, his critics claimed that Moses was designing for a particular strata of New York residents. He constructed overpasses that were made purposely too low for buses to clear, providing easy car access for wealthier, white people, while preventing the poor and minorities (largely dependent on public transport) from accessing those beaches and parks.
