Thanks to Sian’s paper – Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies (2009) – I offer the course another metaphor – the fog is clearing. Having read this, I now feel more able to get my head around the last two weeks’s analysis of cyborgs and digital culture. Let me answer this question:
“The posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.” (Hayles 1999, 3) One of the structuring principles of this course – the lifestream and the learning environment itself – is about disaggregation and reaggregation – taking things apart, scattering them across the network, and then having them put back together by the machine. What other connections might there be between cyborg theory and the pragmatics of online pedagogy and course design?
For me, Sian cleared the fog by discussing digital pedagogy in terms of its uncanny nature. In developing new learning environments, both learners and teachers are lifted out of the comfort zones of familiar territory. The cyborg metaphors linked to virtual environments further exacerbate the state of anomie by being such liberating entities, they offer the potential for society to re-write the script on what constitutes cultural norms. So, for example, taking the question of lifestreaming – disaggregation and reaggregation – the problem for academia, may not so much be a lifestream constitute”a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity” but instead simply represent a new form of representing learning that challenges traditional concepts of pedagogy.
Asking students to submit lifestreams as assessed elements of a programme is an attempt provisionally to capture something of the ‘spectrality’ of their digital existences. As an assessment strategy, it works with the idea of the learning process as volatile, disorienting and invigorating, and it also stretches conventional assessment frameworks to their limits. In defamiliarising the familiar through creative pedagogical appropriation of the digital, teaching becomes newly, and productively, strange.
Bayne (2009) p8
This paper has helped me formulate some clear thoughts, not only on the value of lifestreaming, but on the whole discussion of cyborg culture over the last three weeks. I see an evolution in my understanding. By beginning with Haraway, I feel the course deliberately took us to the far end of digital cultural spectrum – a dystopic image of mankind and technology merging as one, to create a neo-spacies, a posthuman. It is only by placing my disturbed emotions to one side, and forgetting about apocalyptic cyborg culture, I am able to identify how technology is enabling me to learn within new, digital environments. The problem with lifestreaming may be less to do with consigning my learning activities to a digital crumb-trail, but to familiarising myself with the capabilities and potential lifestreaming offers. A few weeks ago, I refered to my lifestream as my digital memory – a classic cyborg state. However, now I see it as simply a chronological catalogue of my online research. The production of the lifestream is not the focal point of my studies – it is what is now inside my head, my thoughts, ideas and knowledge. It is through digital mediums, I feel I have learned. The big challenge has been coming to terms with the new environment.
As a learner in higher education, the student:is in a process in which she is, in a sense, being estranged from herself… The student is asked to submit to the strangeness of new worlds opening before her. If they were not strange worlds, there would be question marks over whether we were in the presence of higher education.
Barnet (2007) quoted in Sian (2009) p6-7
Thanks Sian.
