Bill's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

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.