Listening music, because what’s a blog without sharing stuff I like. Don’t worry, it won’t always be metal, my musical tastes are eclectic to say the least.

Before I really respond to this particular reading I wanted to remark at how transparent the course’s intentions and material is. Rarely do students even ask (me included) why we study or learn a particular thing, let alone the teacher directly explaining why. I love to see such a straightforward and, really, honest way of delivering the course’s content.

It helps us as students give meaning and direction to any subsequent activity, and I think this is what education really needs because in an everyday situation we act based on reason. If we’re hungry we’ll eat, so when someone asks why, “I’m hungry.” or why lining up early for a new smartphone, “I want to get it quickly.” As bad as those example are, what I really want to get across is that I think being transparent and honest about a subject’s goals is a bloody brilliant way to make concrete the motivator for teaching it.

As for the reading, there was one particular statement that resonated with me, “contemporary media students need to develop a range of literacies around Internet and digital technologies.” Any student in any University relies on the internet. I googled some quick statistics and found that in a study taken out between 2008 and 2009, at least 60% of homes in Australia in every state have internet access with ACT having the highest percentage of access at just over 80% (but they’e the smallest so it’s an easy win for them). 

That was 4 years ago, some further googling shows that the percentage of Australian homes with internet access has risen to over 80% since then with Wikipedia stating that percentage was at 82.3% for 2012. Internet access is already a prevalent technology and will continue to be faster and more accessible as the years go by, so using blogs and internet dynamics as a platform for contemporary media education is an very intuitive idea.

Give it another five or ten years and who knows, maybe Universities from all around the world can merge classes and undertake curriculum parallel with one another which would introduce further idea dissemination, cultural education and bigger collaborations. We might end up with ‘Global Universities’ that capitalise on internet access and internationally available education. It could bring a whole new meaning to standardised education (but I think at that point it would be far from standard, it would be magnificent).