Course info
  • David Orban
  • Self-Paced
  • 2 Weeks (2 Hours)
  • Free
  • Certified
  • Virtual Classroom:
  • Emma is experimental in nature and uses an integrated advanced automatic translation service
  • English

Course Overview

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Persona, society and technology: processes of transformation in a digital age.
We are becoming digital in a way that is not clearly understandable yet. We are no longer capable of distinguishing between what is real and what is virtual, as we did at the beginning of the digital story. Our lives, bodies, emotions, feelings and memories are strongly embedded in the digital world. For better or worse, we are living in a technological era which is re-defining how we think, learn, love, work. What does it mean to be a digital persona? What is the role of algorithms, the digital unconscious and knowledge networks.

This MOOC involves distinguished experts in the field of digital culture in open discussion. They present their own reflections on these questions, and their contributions take us through the changing landscape of self, society and technology, transforming hopes and criticism into food for thought.

Whatever your reason for joining this MOOC, you can explore the questions with our experts to clarify your own responses.

You can exploit the course in 2 ways

1. Serendipity
Play a game of Fortune. Choose any expert as your starting point and then randomly construct your own learning journey through digital culture. You will discover your own logic and connections between the different contributions. Using the coursebook, you can record and comment your journey, and share it with other users. 

Click on [video tutorial] to find out more about the Coursebook feature.


2. Guided tour
You can see these MOOCs as conceptual sets that navigate you through the changing technological and societal landscape. Each set offers you different perspectives and challenges to reflect on and enjoy:

(i) Situating individual minds within the landscape (Bogliolo, Sorrentino, de Waard, Webster)

(ii) Mapping emerging territories and directing the individual within the new socio-technical regimes (Orban, Weinberger, Downes, Miranda)

(iii) Describing/redescribing paradigms and realities (Boyd, de Kerckhove, Powe, van Heusden).

In the lesson of Digital Dis-courses MOOC, David Orban discusses the exponential development of technologies and how this relates to political decentralisation. In his second lesson, he then applies his theories to education to give us a glimpse of how education of the future might look.

Course Structure

  • Lesson 1 - Exponential technologies and decentralisation
  • Lesson 2 - The Future of Education

Teacher

David Orban

David Orban is an entrepreneur and visionary, and is the CEO of dotSUB, the leading technology and services provider powering video viewing via captions and translations as subtitles in any language to increase access, engagement and global reach, based in New York City.

David is also a Lecturer of, and Advisor to Singularity University, an interdisciplinary university whose mission is to assemble, educate and inspire leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s grand challenges.

He is the Chairman, and is on the Board of Directors of Humanity, an organization dedicated to promoting understanding, interest, and participation in fields of emerging innovation. He represents a growing movement of people willing to work proactively to benefit the human condition through a commitment to scientific advancement. David is the Managing Partner of Network Society Ventures, a seed stage global venture investment firm. Network Society Ventures seeks to invest in disruptive technology-based companies that are leading the transformation from the post-industrial age to the Network Society.