Course info
  • 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 collective 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 MOOC lessons 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 this lesson of the collective MOOC Derrick De Kerckhove, considered the natural heir to McLuhan, discusses people's changing power relationship with words, especially through screens. In his second lesson he applies his theories to education, to give us a glimpse of how education of the future might look.

Course Structure

  • Lesson 1 - Language, media and power
  • Lesson 2 - The Future of Education

Teacher

Derrick de Kerckhove

Derrick de Kerckhove (born 1944) is the author of The Skin of Culture and Connected Intelligence and Professor in the Department of French at the University of Toronto, Canada. He was the Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology from 1983 until 2008.

In January 2007, he returned to Italy for the project and Fellowship “Rientro dei cervelli”, in the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Naples Federico II where he teaches "Sociologia della cultura digitale" and "Marketing e nuovi media". He was invited to return to the Library of Congress for another engagement in the Spring of 2008.  He is research supervisor for the PhD Planetary Collegium M-node directed by Francesco Monico. Since 2008 he oversees global art projects for Solstizio, co-founded by the artist Giuseppe Stampone.