Week 9, Neo- Luddite

A neo-luddite being someone ‘‘who distrusts or fears the inevitable changes brought about by new technology” and believes that the “technical systems have evolved to control us rather than to serve us” (http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/luddite.html) would fins it very hard to ‘get by’ in a university today. It would be frustrating as a lot of the university life both socially and academically is revolved around new technology especially the internet. For example to access most things to do with this course you have to look on the MCC homepage.. on the internet. Furthermore a lot of contact with tutors is via email, and timetable changes and notifications of changed are displayed in the internet to. The person would struggle to start the course if they couldn’t access the internet for timetable and other notifications about room changes etc. Furthermore they would then find the rest of course frustrating as a fair bit of it requires the internet for research and e-journals to actually pass the unit. In addition to this a lot of our group work is arranged over facebook or msn or by mobile phone. Infact the more I describe it the more I think about how much technology is vital for our course and Uni in general. Its not just the academic side that might be frustrating as well. For example when I came to Uni I didn’t have facebook or anything I thought it was just something silly but felt I had to get it at Uni to be involved properly. This was because my new flats mates would write in each others walls, and comment on each others photos from funny nights out together and I wasn’t able to join in on this ‘bonding’.
I suppose if it didn’t exist at all (new technology) we wouldn’t need it and would have other ways of teaching and having research, but it is here and we use it so much that it must be very hard for a neo-luddite to enjoy and get through Uni.