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.