This marks my return to my blog after an enforced absence; having a medical problem myself, trying to teach effectively, looking after a household, two dogs, five cats and two rabbits plus a wife recovering from a major operation showed me just how much clay my feet were made of.
I celebrated my return by starting with Sian Bayne’s ‘Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies’ because I suspected it would be to my taste, bring me back into academia and so, as you will see, it was and did (if somewhat belatedly).
This paper and in particular the ‘uncanny’ resonates strongly with the quality of learning environment I have always set for myself as a learning space. That learning which has stayed with me over the years and on which I was able, in my modest way, to build upon has always contained within it the elements of the uncanny; that borderline which you cross and find yourself in mid-air, without bodyhold; spectrally suspended between tors of ideas, wondering if you have a parachute to land sanely. For me the experience began in puberty and there were seminal figures in my personal, non-school education all of whom contributed to such feelings:
- Conrad’s ‘Shadow Line’ which showed me the line I was literally crossing
- Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ and ‘The Waste Land’ which enabled me to begin to understand the significance of time, history and civilizations
- Anais Nin’s ‘Diaries’ which enabled me to see that the masks I was obliged to use at school in my writings were absurd and unnecessary
- Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’ which showed me the difference between writing from the mind and writing from the heart
- Russell’s ‘Prologue’ to his autobiography which stated the purpose of life better than I ever could
- Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet’ which made me dream of a longing for ‘hypertext’ never believing it would become a reality
in the mind's eye
… and of course there were many more. Significantly I think more from encounters literal or figurative which related little to my school education; later at university, the meetings of minds happened with everyone but almost always beyond the bounds of the classroom or lecture hall. Therefore, as long ago as I can remember, I have preferred to inhabit a world unbounded by bells, buzzers and classroom doors. I choose to visit twitter from time to time; I revel in delicio.us and google images which supplement and engage my memory and creativity. I decline to give more than nodding acquaintanceship to facebook because it simply isn’t me. So my uncanny academetron freed me from the confines of the traditional one. Therefore I was able to react to the wherever, whenever and however rather than be confined by the classroom even if the price was enforced bodily imprisonment at times – nobody can enslave my mind and soul unless I will it so. This freedom which I demanded for myself enabled me to reflect as deeply as I wished before acting; to allow images, ideas, concepts to mature like fine wine or whisky before crossing my tongue. From the unheimliche comes the uncanny idea out of memory modified by time and space. This, to borrow Koestler’s terminology is represented by ‘The Act of Creation’ and ‘The Ghost in the Machine’.
The nurturing of intellectual uncertainty as prerequisite for education rather mere teaching has always been the duty of educators; I am thinking of Plato’s Socration dialectic, Neil’s learning space, Lyward’s ‘reweaning from dependence toward independence’ and Illich’s de-schooling which have all sought to fulfill such aims. Hauntology as cited here reminds me again of Eliot in Burnt Norton:
‘Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.’
Intellectually universities have always offered chosen successful scholars ‘a place of ghosts’, the chance to work alone, on their own initiative, to align themselves in exchanges with peers and students with the aim of forging an academic excalibur from the spectres of other scholars or from their own haunted imagination.
imagination
The new ‘Distance Diversity’, as I like to think of it, could offer that loose-tight freedom to all students which I find here called ‘flexible fluid movements’; it being one of the cardinal strengths which the uncanny offers to digital pedagogies. Fortunately, most of the time, there is the chance to shut out the source of the inspiration, to allow us to reflect and savour that inspiration, before allowing the source gratefully, graciously and seamlessly back in. A podcast or a video stream can be paused, re-run and re-invented on the spot; no other educational form or forum offers such flexibility as virtual environments do.
Now, reluctantly, under time pressure I want to close this blog entry with ‘Creativity, fulfillment and flow’ by Mikhaly, Czikszentmihalyi from TED talks:
References:
Bayne, S. (forthcoming, March 2010). Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies. London Review of Education. [revised version uploaded 10 November 09]
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