Newspeak; ++ungood

Is it a new thing that different contexts “penetrate” the classroom? I’ve heard people talking and writing about the fact that ICT makes it possible to move across many different contexts in much shorter periods of time than before. “Context” here means something completely different than “place,” but when this is ignored you may start talking about a sort of “heterotopic classroom of the web 2.0 age” (completely missing Foucault’s ideas with the term, I believe). And not only that: “Multimodality” is used to capture elements of new genres associated with the use of ICT (everything is so digital and multi, this days), so one ultimately, though completely “counter-evolutionary,” even allow oneself to speak of qualitatively new forms of learning.

What is new is not how we learn, but how we speak about it. When “creativity” is sees as a part of “digital literacy” some might think that this is where creativity belongs: In a multimodal, ICT mediated classroom of cooperation. Neither the place, nor the means are any prerequisite for creativity. It’s like educational researchers are stunned by the fact that children can be inventive, and then, intoxicated with newspeak and techno optimism, talk about this as something entirely new (and of course “mediated” by new technology).

We have paradigm shifts for breakfast. I need lunch