Bill's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

You have reached the end of the internet.
Please turn off the lights before you leave.

OK, perhaps things are not so dramatic but you have definitely reached the end of my lifestream. As a chronological collection of my digital activities and interests, my lifestream hopefully conveys a sense of my many disembodied online presences. These posthuman selves of mine are aggregated in the lifestream, but although the end result is less fragmented than my sense of online selfhood, I question whether it forms a coherent whole that is fully representative of who I am. I see it more as a representation of who I was supposed to be for the needs of this course; and if it weren’t for the inclusion of blog posts and comments, my lifestream would be haunted by a number of voiceless digital re-embodiments of myself that keep feeding it events like bots or automatons. On the positive side, however, this is an image of me as producer and information disseminator, not as a passive spectator in a classroom or a member of the “sit and watch” culture. In this respect the lifestream was a powerful motivator for participation, exploration and sharing.

My lifestream also reflects the multimodal nature of contemporary digital forms of human expression as well as the various literacies and transliteracies I had developed prior to course and those I acquired during these twelve weeks. My documented use of a plethora of Web 2.0 tools and services is indicative of how digital technology augments human abilities (with the tools acting as cybernetic prostheses) and reveals the value of using a wide range of tools (blogging and microblogging, social bookmarking and photo/video sharing, synchronous and asynchronous CMC, discussion forum, etc.). From the course designer’s point of view, these tools support a holistic approach at socially constructive learning and help students build a strong sense of an online community, while from the student’s point of view they facilitate different aspects of learning (reflection, communication, production, commenting and meta-commenting, sharing, etc.) and cater to different types of learning. Digital tool literacy emerges as an important asset for 21st century learners, equally important to linguistic competence, in that it enables interaction with the course materials and mechanisms.

A final thought: as a metaphor, the concept of the lifestream has one major drawback, the fact that it triggers images or horizontal movement. A retrospective look at my feeds, made me think more of digging for knowledge than of flowing towards it. The major themes of the course (digital utopias and dystopias, virtual communities and cyborg and uncanny pedagogies) keep recurring (as also evidenced by the tag cloud) but every week they are probed even deeper as interconnections are made and concepts are examined. In this respect, the lifestream offers proof of actual learning and therefore is invaluable.

While my activity during this week focused on familiar media and themes, I found myself wondering “Where is it all going?”

Web 3.0 (or the Semantic Web) is almost here, HTML 5.0 and CSS3 are just around the corner and promise to change the way we see the Web and conduct our business online, VLEs are dead (for some) or rising from the grave (for others), Twitter and Facebook have seen phenomenal growth lately and social media have taken over the business world, the average American teen sends 2,272 text messages per month, Finland made 1-Mbit broadband access a legal right, the Turkish government plans to give an e-mail address to each of its 70 million citizens, new web tools for educators are being created everyday, time-tested educational ontologies are haunted by the ghosts of disembodied students and educators, old metaphors (the cyborg) are beginning to show their age, traditional literacies are proving inadequate and pedagogical models are in urgent need of an upgrade. The future looks intriguing, beautiful, dangerous, full of promise, full of threat. But more importantly, it looks full of challenge for students and teachers alike.

So, where is it all going? I don’t know. But I hope that getting there will be fascinating!

This week’s great readings prompted a couple of blog posts on cyborg pedagogies, digital technologies as cybernetic prostheses, materiality and what the physical absence of the teacher means for distance education. All fascinating ideas that made me attempt to reverse-engineer our course and reveal Sian and Jen’s master design. At the same time, I noted with concern that the problem education is facing has now been taken to a whole new level. At the start of the century the debate on the future of education focused on the digital rift between teachers and students, between digital immigrants and digital natives. It now seems that while this distinction was not completely unfounded, it has become rather irrelevant. Digital technologies have brought about profound changes that don’t just require teachers to become more tech-savvy. Text is not what it used to be, teachers and students are dislocated and disembodied, everybody and everything is wired and interconnected and the need for a whole new pedagogy is more pressing than ever. In other words, “Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore…”

The rest of my lifestream feeds were about social media and Web 2.0 tools for education, more digital culture books (Seth Godin’s Small is the new Big is full of fascinating ideas) and –of course– the glorious virtual graduation ceremony held in SecondLife.

Lots of activity this week, in a number of directions, a fact that’s indicative of how stimulating this course has been for me so far. I watched a lot of videos by M. Wesch, Haraday and Baudrillard, started looking at some other of N.K. Hayles’ books, used Twitter mainly for relaying links for interesting papers, tools and conferences, delved deeper into Google Wave and started using it for collaboratively designing a seminar on new media for teachers, discovered a very cool, most definitely posthuman, museum exhibit titled Artefact H10515 and revisited a Simpsons episode that parodies Apple. If anything, all this varied activity hints at the many ways that digital technologies are affecting our culture.

McWilliam and Palmer’s paper on the importance of the teacher’s material presence in teaching reminded me of something a colleague once told me: “65% of all teaching is performance”. You might disagree with his percentage or dismiss him as a proponent of old-fashioned transmissive teaching methods, but anyone who has ever taught in a classroom understands there is at least a core of truth in that statement.

Distance/online learning disembodies not only the students but the teacher as well and raises a few interesting questions: Does teaching become harder without a material body? Can avatars and online profiles adequately substitute the material presence of the teacher? Does this material absence mean that there’s actually 65% less teaching in online learning. Or –the horror!– 65% less learning?

If you’re looking for quick answers, I’d say: Yes / No / Not 65%, but there’s certainly less “teaching” and more “facilitating” / Certainly not, but this is also a matter of effective course design. But the real question is this: are we heading towards a postcyborg pedagogy in which the material teacher or the human teacher will be completely obsolete? One imagines the bodies of teachers being exhibited in future museums or freak-shows (”See a teacher from the past! Marvel at the inner workings of a primitive teaching machine!), embalmed, or plastinated and dissected like the poor corpses of Gunther von Hagens. At the core of this concern lies the fear that several other professions have experienced or are experiencing right now, the fear that digital technology will make us redundant, obsolete. But I feel that the real challenge here is not just our survival but our adaptation to the needs of the digital era for the benefit of our students.

McWilliam, E and Palmer, P. (1995). Teaching tech(no)bodies: open learning and postgraduate pedagogy. Australian Universities’ Review, 2.

Inner workings

The readings by Usher and Bayne on uncanny, dislocated pedagogies triggered a reverse engineering process in my mind and allowed me to lift the lid and examine the inner workings of our course. Among the cogs and wheels I can now see:

All this “embodied absence” and “disembodied presence” involves students “in an uncanny move toward the posthuman” but also hurtles the university out of its comfort zone and into the dislocated space of ontological uncertainties. It will be nice to see whether the new pedagogies emerging from such instructional designs will stand the test of time or whether they will fade and become ghosts themselves, just as VLEs are now regarded as… well, dead.

* Usher, R. and Edwards, R. (1998). Lost and found: ‘cyberspace’ and the (dis)location of teaching, learning and research. SCUTREA 1998, Exeter.

* Bayne, S. (forthcoming, March 2010). Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies. London Review of Education. [revised version uploaded 10 November 09]

This week was largely devoted to the readings by Dona Haraway (“A Cyborg Manifesto”) and N. Katherine Hayles (“Towards embodied virtuality” and “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere”) and to philosophical questions on what being posthuman is.

I can’t say I became a fan of Haraway; her much-praised (and much-criticised) article now shows its age and was too dense for me. I had to turn to a number of summaries and interpretations by other scholars in order to make it accessible.

And while Haraway convincingly argues that the power of the cyborg as a metaphor cannot be fully seen in the limiting context of utopic/dystopic binaries and that it lies in the transgression of boundaries, Hayles shockingly states that the cyborg is out-of-date. Hayles places the cyborg in the mythological pantheon that contains the centaur and other “augmented human” fantasies or scenarios. In a world where even your tea-kettle will soon have wi-fi, the cyborg is “not networked enough”.

ArteFact H10515

Cyberspace, on the other hand, has certainly not died but has evolved (or is that mutated?) into the cognisphere (or “noosphere” from the Greek word νους, i.e. noesis, intellect), which has “[e]xpanded to include not only the Internet but also networked and programmable systems that feed into it, including wired and wireless data flows across the electromagnetic spectrum”. The cognisphere, a sort of Cyberspace 2.0 with a hint of The Matrix, “gives a name and shape to the globally interconnected cognitive systems in which humans are increasingly embedded. As the name implies, humans are not the only actors within this system; machine cognizers are crucial players as well.”

It is certainly an indication of profound change when powerful popular metaphors mutate or become obsolete. But while we’re busy observing how the material and digital worlds around us evolve every day, perhaps we should take a moment to consider a couple of philosophical questions: If embodiment is not essential to human being and consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, as Hayles mentions, are we just informational processes? And if yes, doesn’t this mean that we’re not just actors within the cognisphere but also mere props, mere “data flows” in a stream of myriads? Finally, if “‘human’ and ‘posthuman’ coexist in shifting configurations”, is this co-existence symbiotic or parasitic?

* Haraway, D. (2000). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. in D Bell and A Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge.

* Hayles, N.K. (1999). Toward embodied virtuality, chapter 1 of How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. pp1-25.

* Hayles, N.K. (2006). Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere. Theory Culture Society, 23/7-8.

I didn’t notice how this week flew by. I spent a lot of hours working on my ethnographic report (and judging by what I’ve seen so far, so did everybody else on theirs). At the same time I started warming up to Twitter again, as it seems to be a great source of links and resources. A lot of the people I follow seem to use it as a real-time social networking tool, although I am positive it was not built for this purpose. Twitter has largely contributed to the Nowism trend. A Trendwatcher.com definition for the term reads as follows:

“NOWISM | “Consumers’ ingrained lust for instant gratification is being satisfied by a host of novel, important (offline and online) real-time products, services and experiences. Consumers are also feverishly contributing to the real-time content avalanche that’s building as we speak. As a result, expect your brand and company to have no choice but to finally mirror and join the ‘now’, in all its splendid chaos, realness and excitement.””

This all important “NOW” moment seems to be partly about instant gratification and partly about anxiety. Are we growing too impatient? In my RL I am a very patient person but during the time I spend online I demand faster input, a more rapid exchange of images and ideas.

Perhaps this has to do with the fact that most of us have too many things to do on the web on a daily basis and too many balls to juggle. We need a faster rate of technological convergence, we need more mash-ups and more services that combine services we already use. In MacWorld 2007, the now hugely successful iPhone was presented by Steve Jobs as “three revolutionary products. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.” And in 2009, Google announced GoogleWave, a tool that was promoted as a new incarnation of e-mail but in essence is an e-mail client, a chat tool and a multi-wiki all rolled into one semi-attractive package.

But perhaps nowism also betrays a fear of death, an acknowledgement of our mortality (“so many tools, so little time”), which is also evident in our long-lasting fascination with the mechanical augmentation of the human body and the creation of Cyborgs. We might have become posthuman in a variety of ways, but we are still tied to our material aspect.

Posthuman MSc students

In our ultimate fantasy, when cyborg-technology overwhelms our biology, mortality won’t be an issue anymore. Paradoxically, while we dream of becoming robot-like, popular culture is full of robots who wish to become “human”. Even cyborgs get the existential blues and once more the grass is greener on the other side.

Neurons

Informational pathways? Check.

Reflexivity? Check.

Autopoiesis? Check.

Is our course… alive?!

A couple of weeks ago I finally resigned to the fact that I had to buy a small A-Z notebook and record all my social media user-ids and passwords. I now have profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, my WordPress blog, Ning and EduSpaces, as well as accounts is Del.icio.us, Wikipedia, YouTube, Library Thing, Diigo, Digg, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Vimeo, SlideShare, Second Life and a few more services. Using these services and making sure my profile is up to date takes a lot of time but also raises important questions: a) How much of my “self” do I project onto each of my online presences? b) Do I switch into slightly different personas depending on the media I am going to use? (In other words, will you find exactly the same Bill on Facebook and YouTube?) c) How does this multi-point activity affect my sense of a coherent self?

To be honest, I feel fragmented. In terms of temporal constraints, my sense of fragmentation is best described by a Greek saying that’s literally translated as “I had to cut myself to a thousand pieces in order to take care of everything”. But it’s not just a time issue; I am aware that a lot of overlapping but ultimately different parts of who I am are up on the Net, yet I still don’t feel that there is a social media on which I have a profile that is fully representative of myself. K.N. Hayles claims that the “I” of the posthuman has been “transformed into the ‘We’ of autonomous agents operating together to make a self”. In that sense, digital culture has amplified and upgraded our vision of own self as a “collectivity”. And although my various Web 2.0 “selves” are not exactly “autonomous” (I hope!), they do have their own needs and their own agendas.

As the time we spend online increases, our sense of a posthuman self will grow stronger. Hayles suggests that “‘human’ and ‘posthuman’ coexist in shifting configurations”; I wonder at what point will the scales be tipped and our posthuman self will be the dominant one.

Or has this already happened…?

Hayles, N.K. (1999). Toward embodied virtuality, chapter 1 of How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. pp1-25