For the past few months, the PLP 10 cohort has been learning about disruption, what it is, how does it affect the world, and how it applies to our lives. For the majority of the unit, we have been working on 3 main assignments, the Disruption Podcast, the Disruption book, and a synthesis essay. In this post, I will focus in on my podcast and essay. If you want to read my book and my experiences throughout the unit click here.

Introduction

At the start of the unit, we were asked to think about disruption. I really had no idea what it meant, other than my brother interrupting me while I’m gaming, so I had a lot of research and learning to do. I found out that disruption is everywhere, from your Ipad, cell phone or the computer your reading this post off of, to the laundry machine you use every week to clean your clothes. Disruption is a disturbance that interrupts an event, activity or process. So, for the laundry machine that I mentioned earlier, it interrupts the procedure of hand cleaning clothes, it saves you time and effort. This unit involved a big field study where the class went to Silicon Valley California where disruptive technology began. Most of our projects were based on this trip, but since 4 of my other classmates along with me decided to stay behind, we based our projects on Disruption at Seycove.

Podcast

The podcast was probably the most challenging assignment I had to do for the unit. Since I was doing mine on disruption at Seycove first I had to research a topic that none of my peers were doing, then I had to interview someone at the school that had knowledge on the topic. I chose to do mine on Indigenous Learning at Seycove. To start the podcast I needed to do a lot of research on The School District’s Aboriginal Education Program. The sd44 school district website is I got most of the information. Then I realized that Seycove had it’s very own Aboriginal Support Teacher, I quickly interviewed her about the program and what it means to be a support teacher. I think the interview went well, i asked the right questions and in return, got the answers i was looking for. The PLP Winter exhibition really helped prepare me for this.

To make and edit this podcast I used an app called Ferite, and to post it i used Soundcloud. I am proud of the podcast, but I still feel I can make it better with more revision.

Essay

At the end of the unit we had to write a synthesis essay on how technology has acted as a disruption throughout history. We were instructed to use a minimum of two sources to include in the essay as well as a source from the book Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (a book we had read and studied earlier). So, the first step to writing a good essay is to create a good thesis. We spent days researching and learning about a good thesis and how to write them. My first thesis was about general disruptive technology throughout history. It was very broad, very boring, and I had trouble expanding it into anything more than an idea. After some time I came up with my final thesis, I wanted to write the essay about communication: Communication technology will always be a disruption in the world, and throughout time there has been many machines and tools that show examples of this. To prove my statement I wrote my essay about the Printing Press, Telephone and the smartphone. I got my sources online on history websites such has History Guide, student research papers from UBC and from Little Brother. Feel free to read my essay below:

The Disruption of Communication Technology.
By: Michael Van Laethem

Communication technology will always be a disruption in the world, and throughout time there has been many machines and tools that show examples of this. The human drive to learn, share knowledge and connect has created technological advancements that have completely disrupted human society and the way we interact with each other.

The invention of the printing press is the first great revolution in communication technology. Prior to 1450, text was hand written and hand copied, so information was only available to few people. Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press “facilitated the wide circulation of information and ideas, acting as an “agent of change” through the societies that it reached.” (Elizabeth Eisenstein, 1980). Suddenly books, newsletters, scientific papers, travel manuals, medical texts, government propaganda and gossip could be printed for mass distribution. This innovation was key to the spread of the Renaissance, it greatly increased literacy rates, and increased the knowledge of not only students but other people as well. A research website called History Guide talks about how the printing press revolutionized schooling: “By giving all scholars the same text to work from, it made progress in critical scholarship and science faster and more reliable.”

Printed materials disrupted the spread of human knowledge, but the material had to be accessed in person. Long distance, fast communication was not possible until the invention of the telephone in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell. “The telephone allows the sender and the receiver to be in direct contact without being physically in each other’s presence through a receiver and a transmitter. The sender and the receiver can be separated by vast distances but their communication is still direct and no interference is required through a messenger.” (UBC Research Paper on the Invention of the Telephone). The telephone has had a hugely disruptive impact on society. No longer did people need to rely on reading and writing to communicate. Families could spread out across the globe and still remain in contact. Business can be conducted across vast distances, and help can be summoned very quickly in case of emergencies.

The Smartphone is the most disruptive electronic product. When the smartphone came out, communication was changed forever. Texting and talking online started to become the new normal. The ease with which people can communicate with a smart phone has reduced a lot of communication to meaningless small talk. Face to face communication has been replaced with staring at a screen. Instead of going out for coffee to see how someone’s doing, you can just ask them from your phone through text, phone calls, and other apps. You can stay in contact with hundreds of people every day. The iPhone allows the user to search up whatever they want on google almost whenever, wherever they are. This affected communication even more because it limits communication with people. The smartphone makes the users life more easy and simple, but it limits their face to face communication and social skills at the same time. With the increasing advancement in technology, people are finding ways to hack modern day communication tools to talk to one another under the radar of the law and government. This makes it much easier for criminals to plan out their schemes without even meeting each other. This idea can be seen in the book Little Brother where the main character, Marcus, downloads an Xbox (gaming console) hack that allows him to communicate with whoever he wants to without the government spying on him: “Paranoid Linux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret.” (Little Brother, Doctorow, Cory). New smartphones, each more disruptive than the other, come out every year, for example, the Apple IPhone. This makes the future of communication undetermined.

Advancements in communication technology has completely disrupted human society. These disruptions do have a negative side, but it is hard to imagine the world today without the printing press, the telephone and the smartphone.

The essay was pretty challenging for me, it took me a long time to find good ideas and sources but once I had a good understanding on what I was writing, it was relatively easy.  I sure have learned a lot during this unit. Not just about Seycove but the whole world. Disruption is everywhere and its going to be exciting to see what the next big technological invention come out to be.