Technology discussions and contemporary applications

Technology can both customize education to the individual and promote community learning. Which is the more important benefit? Do the two goals conflict with each other?

Community is an aggregation of individuals and therefore I see the one as containing and including the other with neither possessing primary importance.

To see that this is the case both concepts need to be defined and delineated upon and we also have to specify the benefits that technology can afford the individual.

As individual learning, individuals can learn different subjects and crafts over the web as well as conduct research and correspond with peers and teachers. Podcasts, iPods, online movies, online / virtual education, forums, chat groups and so forth -- anything that is technology based -- can vivify / animate learning and expand the individual's understanding of the subject. Information can also be more rapidly obtained so, for instance instead of waiting to library hours and hoping to obtain a certain book, the individual can obtain that material within a nana-second. Also important is the fact that an enormous, unimaginable abundance of material is available to the individual and all at the relatively free cost of internet application (and if using the library, none at all). One literally has the world at his fingertips and this can be enormous advantage to the individual. Disadvantages are few and include the fact that unreliable material is assimilated with reliable sources and the individual has to learn to differentiate. But this may have happened without technological opportunities too.

'Community learning' in the context of the question likely refers to groups formed within the community structure gathering for the shared purpose of acquiring a skill and/or further knowledge of a specific subject. This can be both practical and theoretical. Benefits here too are numerous in that instead of, for instance, arduously working to schedule and arrange meetings for individuals to meet at one time in a physical framework (and, frequently, this can be imposisble due to geogprahical distances), indivduals can instead convene from the privacy of their own home at their own convenience in both time and location. There are certain disadvantages to this, but the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.

As Dew (2010) notes, technology has literally changes the face of education enabling students -- or any individual for that matter -- to pursue a subject any time anywhere and in whichever format they desire.

Students can learn while jogging (by using, for instance their iPod) or they can learn on campus whilst using their computer and attending online courses. In this way, community learning and individual learning merges and technology can benefit both, although its benefits can be a mixed blessing.

Shiv Visvanathan asserts that science and technology have at times been complicit in violence against individuals, societies and cultures. He broadens the concept of 'violence' to include systemic damage to ways of life, cultural and biological diversity, and questions whether 'progress' is always a beneficial force.

How does Visvanathan suggest science and technology can better meet the needs of societies, communities and ecosystems? Make specific reference to the essay in your answer.

It is not easy to catch Visvanathan's drift but it seems to me that he is saying that America attempts, via its technology to squeeze all humanity in one undifferentiated cast and mold, seemingly Western-style. It is in this way that science and technology are complicit against individuals, society and cultures. Science and technology can better meet the needs of societies, communities and ecosystems by stepping away from their agenda and hubris-bloated superficialities and seeing the problems of these communities -- and their realities -- exactly as is. By making itself "a high information society," America is, paradoxically, not becoming one since, by submerging the individuality of all into one, it is distorting that individuality and disabling itself form receding the true picture.