From ‘iConsumers’ to ‘weLearners’: Negotiating Online Communities

By David Dulceany. In one of the videos this week for the MOOC History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education, there is a discussion of the iPod experiment, where, in 2003, students at Duke received free iPods and were challenged to use them in innovative ways for educational purposes. The video introduces the idea of how the “i” in “iPod” is a reference to the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, or “I think, therefore I am.”
With this in mind, I began to think how this “i” ties the users of the product and other iProducts to a personal identification with consumerist culture, making them into iConsumers. More...