This project is essentially a case study, but presented digitally through a Wordpress site. This was the first website I helped to build within the MET program. Through our site we guide viewers through pre-activities (survey and exercises), a timeline of past to future spirituality in technology, and in-depth look at our case study.

​ I was first exposed to Dudeism during my Minor studies and I was excited to revisit it, as it is a great case study in how spirituality and technology can become interconnected. ​To add to this fun project, we were able to get in touch with the "Dudely Lama," the head of the Church of Dude, to ask him his thoughts on the connection between tech and spirituality; you can read his insightful responses on our site. 

Overall I think that this project was a great exercise in being able to better understand that technology is not just simply computers, tablets, phones, etc.

Technology is a "revealing" (Heidegger, 1977) - it is something that leads to discovery. When you view technology in this way you realize that the possibilities of creation and implementation for Educational Technologists is much broader than what might originally be anticipated as computer systems and tablet applications. Through considering the connection between technology and spirituality, I experienced cognitive dissonance - a change in understanding (Festinger, 1957). 

Essentially, TrollXChromosomes is a "humour based feminist online subreddit (forum), with members as self-proclaimed 'trolls'... while the site is asynchronous, there are hundreds of active members online at any given time" (Handford, 2017). 

Through my study I learned that TrollXChromosomes, while humour based, is also serious in it's aim to educate users on feminism and on intercultural understanding. As well, I learned about how the culture communicates, and how users become "encultured" within the culture of TrollXChromosomes. One way that users become encultured is through the clever use of visual memes. 

Through Reddit, cultures like TrollXChromosomes are able to grow and thrive. Users have tools that enable them to negotiate their cultural beliefs amongst each other and rules can be set to govern their communities (Hewling, 2006, p. 337). 

Overall this assignment helped me to better understand that culture can be generated and thrive within the digital sphere. And as I discussed in my assignment, "While there is some debate over whether virtual groups constitute real communities, I believe that TrollXChromosomes is a good example of a culture that is using new interactive and visual tools to build a participatory community of people in the digital sphere (Chen and Dai, 2012, p. 127)" (Handford, 2017). This is another instance of cognitive dissonance within my MET journey (Festinger, 1957). When I first started ETEC 565G, I had assumed that cultures could exist within the digital sphere, but that they could not be created within the digital sphere - that they could only integrate digitally after creation, however, after analyzing TrollXChromosomes, I now believe that it is possible for cultures to originate online. 

Through this analysis I now realize that it is important to observe and involve yourself in communities (both online and offline) that you potentially might impact through learning solutions, as "meaning is in the context while very little is in the transmitted message" (Hall, 1983, 229). 

There was a lot of trial and error that occurred during the course of this project. Originally we had designed the rubric to include all three of our potential users, however, that method proved to be ineffective. We had originally attempted to organize our rubrics by Students, Teachers, and Administrators, but we quickly realized it is difficult to divide these users in such a separate way. We realized that there is a lot more overlap between users than we had originally thought. It was important that we came to this realization during our process, as we diligently worked to ensure that our collective final rubric factored in the needs of all the potential users to facilitate their varying needs (Spiro, 2014). 

I could see an exercise like this (developing a rubric) being a useful exercise in real-world scenarios. While using pre-made rubrics and assessments is easy, I have learned that it is more effective to create rubrics with specific goals in mind. 

This paper was one of my first introductions to Constructivism in MET, as iPads are mobile and encourage interactivity. I later learned more about M-learning in ETEC 565M (Mobile Ed) - that mobile devices can help learners in many ways including helping them articulate their ideas in different ways (Dezuanni et al., 2015, p. 150), helping decrease the time barriers between learning (increased learning outside of classrooms) (Hu, 2011), and helping to increase learner motivation (Musti-Rao et al., 2016, p. 154).  

Overall this paper helped me to understand how to apply TPCK to learning environments. iPads work well in a TPCK learning environment because of the ability it offers learners to customize the tech to meet the pedagogical needs and to enhance the content being taught (Lapowsky, 2015, p. 4). However, other tech can also be effective in learning, it is important for educators to ask themselves "does this technology work well with the learning needs?"

Sometimes, as I have experienced, learning environments do not allow for a perfect match between tech, students, and content. However, TPCK is still a good foundation for considering tech, and for evaluating its effectiveness in educational settings. ​