Join the Pod and Ponder series to discuss with colleagues how to form students as mature critics of innovative technology. Together, we will reflect on podcasts featuring educators, technology critics, and digital humanists that call for purposeful and holistic responses to modern AI from various perspectives and philosophical commitments. Dive into lively discussions, develop practical classroom strategies, and help students grow as mature critics of the digital age!
Each session will be a self-contained conversation over Zoom surrounding a specific podcast episode, so join whichever ones interest you. We will begin with a discussion on how to evaluate the effects of innovative technology on us, our students, and society.
41 Questions for Technologies We Use, and That Use Us (The Ezra Klein Show)
November 6th, 2024, 12:15 – 1:00 PM
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We all know by now that Zoom causes fatigue, social media spreads misinformation and Google Maps is wiping out our sense of direction. We also know, of course, that Zoom allows us to cooperate across continents, that social media connects us to our families and Google Maps keeps us from being lost. A lot of technological criticism today is about weighing whether a technology is good or bad, or judging its various uses. But there’s an older tradition of criticism that asks a more fundamental and nuanced question: How do these technologies change the people who use them, both for good and for bad? And what do the people who use them — all of us, in other words — actually want? Do we even know? L.M. Sacasas explores these questions in his great newsletter, “The Convivial Society.” His work is marrying the theorists of the 20th century — Hannah Arendt, C.S. Lewis, Ivan Illich, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman and more — to the technologies of the present day. I’ve [the host, Ezra Klein] found this merging of past thinkers and contemporary concerns revelatory in an era when we tend to take the shape of our world for granted and forget how it would look to those who stood outside it, or how it looked to those who were there at the inception of these tools and mediums.
See the whole series and listen to embedded podcasts at celt.smumn.edu/pod-and-ponder.
