The readings this week highlighted some issues that I had not considered about the widespread use of educational technology, and its rapid adoption into the daily lives of tons of people over the last few years. Although my perception was that edtech was only really developed in the last 5 years, I was surprised to learn about InBloom in the piece by Regan and Jesse (2018). InBloom was surprising to me as they were a highly developed software that was being applied in 2014, which would lead me to believe that there are some very well constructed edtech tools today, whether that be for better or worse in regards to the ethical challenges of edtech remains  unanswered. I found the fourth ethical concern brought up in the reading to be especially interesting, that being big data challenging individual autonomy as software in this field is being applied on children from a very young age. In the 2018 reading, The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy, Morris and Stommel introduced some terms that I found helpful in the discussion of topics outside of EDCI. Namely, problem-posing education is a concept that I found has been very helpful to my learning, but I did not know the term for it. This was a bit of a ‘aha’ moment for me as I found the first reading really mad me skeptical about the uses of edtech, but Morris and Strommel brought to my attention that knowledge on learning processes can improve ones knowledge creation. I found that the last reading was difficult for me to understand. While I do understand the idea of practitioners creating conditions for critical thinking, rational judgements, and understanding through engagement, I think these conditions are created by individuals at the community level. I think for me the difficulty lies in that I think it is very difficult to foster community in a blended learning environment, so the responsibility largely falls on the individual to do so, or to engage with learning in other ways.

Overall, I thought this week felt very connected, and I enjoyed reading all of these pieces as I felt myself changing my mind a few times throughout on concepts that overlapped within the readings, or between them. This was especially evident for between Regan and Jesse’s 2018 piece and Morris and Stommel’s work, as I felt that the latter touched on how successful applied learning process can be, while the former made me question how much information we should gather on a learners interactions.