It's not an accident that workers get locked out of knowledge. This hits me hard as a teacher—the gatekeeping of knowledge feels designed. Keep workers (or students) ignorant, and you keep them compliant. How am I supposed to help this be a better world for everyone if I never have the vision of its potential?

high-tech isn't required to enforce domination. Sometimes the simplest tools are the most insidious. We underestimate the genius of simplicity in control—pacing is everything in schools too, from bell schedules to testing windows. Behaviorism teaches us how to condition the masses, and setting forth routines and expectations helps administrators assert a culture of control.

Tech is never neutral. This is exactly why I'm skeptical of ed-tech "solutions". The tool might be brilliant, but who owns it, and how do they wield it? That's the real story. AI as a tutor becomes a uniform process of indoctrination as it guides you to think like the programmers want you to think, and refuses to answer questions you have based on an 'ethical' pretense. Who's ethics matter to me? Someone else's or my own?

The machine isn't just replacing labor, it's erasing identities built on skill. I get why strikes weren't just about wages—they were about dignity and purpose being stripped away.

I'm flagging this because Marx nails the paradox of innovation: tech that could free us instead undermines us. To me, this feels like deja vu in education with AI—we're told these tools are "empowering," but in practice they're just ways to deskill and control teachers. I see the same rhetoric today. Capital sells "efficiency", but the real play is control over labor.

I personally like the idea of consuming ideas; those ideas can nourish your mind and your soul. Once you have glutted yourself on this smorgasbord of ideas, you can at last begin to create new ideas with confidence of a practiced mind through ingestion and reflection.

Being able to humble and modest about a text is not enough; it also takes perseverance and commitment to see a learning journey through the very end. There will be struggles, but no fruit can truly be savored without the struggle to acquire it.

This reminds me of my study of the science of reading. How text levels need to be instructional level and not frustration level. It is always important to challenge yourself when reading, and that is where the tie in for modesty comes into the picture. If we aren't modest about our abilities and our understanding, then we do not take the first step to knowing something truly without the weight of shame anchoring us to the bottom of the ocean floor as our insecurities grind us down into nothingness. It is a pivotal thought to realize that learning should be approached with humility. We are not all knowing and everyone can stand to teach us something if we are modest and willing to learn it.

Many intellectuals also have some degree of neurodivergence, and I think that--in addition to historical-sociological and ideological conditioning--there is also a neurochemical or neurological link to inventive and innovative ideas. There must be more at play than these two concepts to create such a wide array of learning experiences and a varied array of individual schema within our society. Think about how varied people are; we find people who are compatible with us, but we rarely ever find someone who is a copy of us due to permutations.

This is referencing schema creation within learners that helps them form new opinions based on prior experience. I wonder if schema creation is not just a sum of prior experiences, but also a conglomeration of genetic factors as well. I would love to see how neurochemistry and genes affect how we learn, and what chemicals develop the feelings we get when we have those a-ha neuron connecting moments.

I recall writing about this earlier before arriving at this part of the text. Learning is an experiential process and more than rote memorization; it is a deep dive into the meaning of an experience and the reflective process of a domino-flick that begins a cascade.

Many readers a guilty of skimming and scanning to capture contextual meaning; however, this process often leaves out the words found in between that further enrich contents. It is only through a full, careful reading of a text that we can hope to facilitate a proper discourse about its material.

Studying is a quest to remember and understand what we read. The real breakthrough in learning is in applying the material to real-world situations. Employers and teachers don't care that you know something like the back of your hand, they care what you do with that information. Regurgitating information because you are well studied is no longer relevant; experiential learning is the future. People don't have fond memories of that time they studied; fond memories derive from beneficial experiences.

The uniqueness of a thought is a beautiful thing. Devotion to a narrative isn't as persuasive and pervasive as an idea that is wholly unique and compelling. As free thinkers, we must challenge our notions of what is true by asking questions (even if those questions sometimes lead us astray). Part of a learning journey is finding your way to another place (Friere's act of becoming), even if you sometimes get lost in the process.)

To truly care about a subject, there has to be a connection that is made between the reader and the author. Without that human connection, there is no motivation to hear what a person has to say. It contributes to their ethos when you feel connected to them.

Within every learner, at some point, they must face their failings and confront their concept of reality; to truly question who they are and who they want to be. When someone endures this process, they can then achieve anything that they set their mind towards with conviction and zeal.

Digital Media & Learning should invert the weekly rhythm of school so that praxis is not the add-on but the spine. Replacing conventional homework with community praxis blocks embedded in the timetable (regular, protected hours when learners work in the world of self-selected problems with accountable partners). Credit is earned through change logs, witness statements, and public debriefs rather than quizzes. Courses become civic studios: the city is the lab, reflection is the instrument, and transformation is the deliverable. This isn't service learning as charity; it is curriculum as collective action, where "media" includes posters, bylaw drafts, street maps, performances, and policy memos that alter conditions on the ground.

The classroom must be recast as a guild where novices and masters co-produce their craft, and authority must be demonstrated through responsiveness, not presumed by position. The asymmetry must be broken as roles need to be reversible for a learning exchange to occur.

The antidote is a "make-witness-revise" curriculum that privileges deeds over declarations. Weeks are structured around building something that did not exist on Monday, witnessing its effects in a real context by Wednesday, and revising by Friday after a public critique. Talk remains, but as residue of work rather than its substitute: critique circles, exhibition days, and field journaling become the assessment score. Media here are not slides but artifacts and arrangements (gardens, pop-up exhibits, neighborhood wayfinding, micro-museums) that readers can touch and residents can use. In this design, the volume of words matters less than their capacity to tee up a change that can be seen, felt, and contested.

DML can institutionalize the why. A weekly 'why' ticket asks each learner to pose a question that would change the next module if taken seriously; an orchestration service clusters submissions and spins up mini design sprints to chase the most generative threads. The breakthrough is curricular responsiveness as scale. The course renews itself from the questions of its participants, and questions becomes a practiced habit rather than a sporadic act of courage; building to the collective schema of the participants within the discoursal community.

This is not a poetic aside; it is an architectural requirement. In DML, the syllabus itself should be fork-able: readings, cases, datasets, and media are version-controlled, and learners submit pull requests that change the course canon in real time. The innovation is curricular co-ownership made technical. Student do not merely contribute posts in this context; they merge content into the backbone of the course, building an evidentiary trail that can be studied as a new kind of learning dataset akin to a repository of knowledge.

Passivity breeds fragmentation. Design integrative assignments that require connecting and weaving multiple perspectives into a single tapestry of human thought and expression.

Authority as scaffolding, not silencing. Provide exemplars + criteria, then get out of the way of creativity. To truly pursue education, student must be set on the path of learning as they are guided to their own unique views on topics rather than dragged along that path.

Preservation rhetoric can mask stagnation. Require students to nominate a reading with a justified alternative. Innovation leads to new perspectives and new ways of thinking which can open the door for social and educational enlightenment.

It is the role of those who have intellect to spread that intellect and foster it in future generations. According to Anthropology (the study of humans), we are social creatures; in ages past, we passed down our history orally from generation to generation. With the emergence of the internet and social media, that onus to pass on our wisdom has not changed and it becomes more critical now than ever. If we allow misinformation to creep into the societal consensus for truth, then the disadvantaged will only become more disadvantaged as literacy rate plummet, and access to jobs that are AI-proof evaporate due to demand and more skilled applicants seeking entry. Education and skill are both tools we can use to navigate a highly competitive society and break the damning cycle of oppression.

Design idea to disrupt fatalism: mastery paths, revision cycles, and public products build efficacy and purpose. The ability to track progress and revise work helps individuals build toward their goals. According to Marzano, goal setting is best practice for K12 students to understand the purpose of the day's lessons. It is my supposition that goal setting would naturally extend to adults; however, this requires further research. Although the supposition seems reasonable since goal setting is that reflective carrot we dangle before ourselves to urge us ever onwards.

Thinking of life's situations as problems that require a solution fuels innovation within our societal framework and births creativity (Bloom's Revised Pyramid's pinnacle). The ability to think outside of the standard deviation of thoughts further enhances human potential.

Adult learning identity work: include reflective e-portfolios that show growth over time rather than teaching to criterion-referenced tests. Design and Development (as well as personal growth) is an iterative and lifelong process. If we consider Lean Six Sigma principles, a majority of problems people face in an institution are Process problems, and rarely people problems; therefore, the process of learning aims to eliminate inefficiencies that hold us back from becoming the best people we are capable of being.

Instructor presence should scaffold autonomy (choice boards, contract grading, portfolios) rather than enforce compliance for its own sake.

Center sense-making. Use simulations and data-driven inquiries instead of information dumps. Memorizing facts only applies to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy's lowest levels of cognition (Remembering and Understanding) rather than more mentally onerous levels like (Analysis and Evaluation).

Dialogue as method. Operationalize via protocols (Socratic circles, peer review rubrics) that make turn-taking and questioning explicit.

Beware trainings that target attitudes while leaving structures intact. Pair mindset work with structural change projects. This also illustrates the struggle we face in Capitalism; the struggle between Wealthy and Impoverished.

This reminds me of power dynamics in design. Who decides what knowledge counts in curriculum development? As LDT practitioners, we need to ensure co-design with learners and stakeholders so that knowledge emerges collaboratively.

The banking model can be critiqued through heutagogy (self-determined learning). This makes me think of how corporate LMS systems often "deposit" compliance modules without engaging learners in authentic practice. How can we shift these designs to be more problem-posing, even within restrictive corporate or K-12 mandates?

This is analogous to drill-and-kill software in edtech that promotes rote learning. It's a reminder to incorporate Gagne's conditions of learning--especially feedback, practice, application--to present surface-level memorization.

Friere critiques the traditional model where teachers merely deliver information. In instructional design terms, this aligns with transmission-focused pedagogy, which ignores learner agency. As an LDT student, I recognize the parallels modern critiques of lecture-based elearning modules that fail to foster interactivty or meaningful engagement.

Students need Text-to-Self, Text-to-World, and Text-to-Text connections. I believe that a teacher is not a one-size-fits-all approach to an issue. What we need are AI tools that make the process of differentiation more accessible to a wider audience rather than going off of a direct-instruction model and adding undue stress to teachers who often create static curriculum due to having too many irons in the fire.

When you are teaching to an assessment (a classical assessment at that), you lower your standard for the quality of instruction. You teach content in a format that creates a disconnect between modern readers with intrinsic interests through abstract ideas that may not be developmentally appropriate given individual student needs and considerations.