Draft paper: Abstract - "Society, Technology and COVID19 in Hodges' model"

"Society, Technology and COVID19 in Hodges' model"

Abstract

 

This descriptive paper explores technology, society and the COVID pandemic, curated through a generic conceptual framework: Hodges' model. Developed in health and education, the model provides an underlying structure and four care, or knowledge domains. Each domain can represent part of what would formally and globally be recognised as curricula. Of four prompts leading to the model's creation, one was to facilitate reflection and critical thinking. The COVID-19 pandemic makes Hodges' model an ideal tool to expatiate its socio-political and individual mental health impacts and technoscientific reponse. This will be demonstrated by using the model to reflect and critique the paper’s themes, exposing conceptual content, dependencies, relationships, stand-points, issues and opportunities. The pandemic has crystalised the irony of the 'information age' and a concurrent gift of an 'infodemic'. In response the paper's focus is the experiential impact of misinformation, fake news, ignorance, and literacies.

To begin, Hodges' model is introduced, then COVID, followed by society and technology in combination, an approach based on previous work that Hodges' model affords. Incorporated in Hodges' model, the political domain invites and facilitates dialectic critique. The model is situated, a product of the combination of structure and potential content. The awareness of various polarities, dualities, and dichotomies inculcates recognition of the 'middle' in whatever context the model is applied. This endows Hodges' model with a substrate inherently suited to deliberation and argumentation, namely, for example, subjective-objective, qualitative-quantitative, person-population, arts-sciences, demand-supply and dependent-independent dualities. The application of the model is explained with several examples, to reveal the convention for committing the model to paper. As will be evident, the author is located in the United Kingdom, but continues to seek - as with this work - a global perspective.


Keywords: COVID; technology; society; conceptual framework; Hodges’ model; ignorance

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