Jonathan Smith is the Dean of Distance Education at Knox Theological Seminary.
This session was the highlight of the conference for me. Why? Well, because finally someone was getting into Marshall McLuhan and I could tell he had a good understanding of McLuhan’s thinking (link).
He also understood the digital native/digital immigrant paradigm. The next generation of students will be full digital natives and will have an even greater expectation of connectivity as part of their education. They will expect access to classes from phones and other devices. Discussions, lectures, and study notes will all be online.
Smith also spent time on McLuhan’s tetrad of media effects (link) and then applied this process of evaluation to the technologies he was endorsing. This involves asking the following questions of any new medium or technology we are considering:
1. What does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?
This was an excellent session that laid out the fundamentals of media and technology study and then applied them to many of the ideas that were presented at BibleTech.
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