Day 9 - From A Day of Glass to A School of Glass #edcmooc

A Day of Glass was utopian to the extreme.  From the glass walls that brighten to wake you up to the playful family relationships that thrive on the super-iPad electronic interactions to the doctors who can look inside your brain to find out what ails you, UTOPIA! But as an educator, the educational uses were even more over the top. From the bulletin boards which kept up to the minute announcements, the architectural glass walls with interactive lesson information, the smart boards with bio-metric response to the teacher's touch and the lesson on color, Awesome! And then the field trip to the Redwoods--I've been to those very redwoods and I've NEVER seen those dinosaurs! I'll bet if I had that glass, I'd see the dinos! And The Bridge was merely a continuation on a smaller scale of A Day of Glass.  Technology's only purpose in the future is to make mankind's life better...to improve education, right? Right?!

The entire time I watched these two videos, another movie kept playing in my mind. Ender's Game, based on the novel by Orson Scott Card, just hit US theaters November 1, 2013. Ender was set primarily in educational environments and most of these were constructed of architectural glass, glass counters with reactive bio-metric surfaces, remote controlled devices which reacted to mere muscle control rather than sticks or buttons--all that we have talked about.  Academic utopia, right? One would think. Except that in Ender's "utopia" the students were being educated to wage war. They were being trained to defend Earth against the enemy who almost wiped out humans 50 years ago, should they return.  
**SPOILER ALERT**  (The book has been around for 30 years so spoilers follow.  If you want to see the movie and haven't read the book, stop here!)

In Ender's utopian educational system where they need to train a 14 year old military force to lead the earth to victory against the alien/bug enemy, no technological advance is spared.  Ender moves up through the ranks with various plot twists and ends up as commander-in-chief-to-be, with only the final exam to go.  He has his team around him in the simulation room near to the enemy planet when he gives it his all and as he sacrifices his entire force, he annihilates the entire species and "wins the game."  Only he soon finds out that it was NOT a simulation, but he had actually committed genocide. The boy is devastated as he thought he was only playing a game.

The metaphors here are many. Ender is the savior of humanity.  He is a third child which is only allowed by special government permission to help save the Earth. Ender is different than other kids.  He is sensitive in ways that others are not. He understands his opponent and through understanding them, he is able to destroy them. It is very interesting the way the military is made up of the best and brightest youth who are sent into battle by the old(er) men who stand behind their safety glass and watch.  Sound familiar?