11.25
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:
| In our use of WordPress, Twitter, Skype, WallWisher, the phpBB forum, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo etc. | “an engagement with a wide range of technologies or de- and rematerialisation”, leading to a questioning of the “thereness” of learners and teachers, with the presence of students spread to a multitude of media of synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication, collaboration and sharing. |
| a deliberate fragmentation of the identity of students, which “requires individuals to re-make their identities” and “re-embody” their multiple selves through the uses of online profiles, personal photos, avatars, etc. | |
| an attempt to produce cyborg-students, where the tools and services used function as cybernetic prostheses. | |
| In the setting up of the course as a blog and in our twittorials | “the use of awkward spaces to and for students” that offer an opportunity for “assimilating and even producing strangeness” |
| In the decision to not use WebCT | a re-interpretation of the “distance” in distance learning, a realization that the “material proximity or even existence of the campus” or its symbolic technological replications is not so important when the campus itself is haunted. |
| a desire to question the power of symbols, in the same way that VLEs once challenged the dominance of the face-to-face lesson in a material classroom. | |
| In the use of the Lifestream plugin | an attempt to gather each student’s dislocated and spectral digital instantations in a –hopefully– coherent whole, in a selective reflection of our course-related stream of consciousness. |
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.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this VideoPress video.* 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]
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