After having spent a large part of the weekend to delve deeper into the wonderland of what is cyberia and cyborgs I seem to have been elluminated in what all this means using philosophical and socialogical ‘cyborg prosthetics’ (virtual specs) to look beyond the core definition of  ‘human with articifial enhancements’ .
In fact it appears to refer to pure symbolism, an allegory for something much grander and much broader namely of a society of humans whose capabilities are extended within a larger virtual network of (effective) communities, cross-fertilising ideas, busy to ignore binary boundaries of gender, race and age.
With this in mind it is easier to see the connection with teaching and learning and how it fits within the context of our MSc course – and also easier to write about in the digital essay…

In one’s lifetime one is inevitably visiting a number of learning spaces, some formal, others more informal. I would argue that most of those, even the traditional ones, are often unfamiliar and sometimes even uncanny.

When I was young my very first day at  primary school was a daunting experience as I found myself surrounded for the first time by a crowd of children much older than myself, running along echoing long hallways or across over-crowded play areas.
I perceived this as scary, but also possibly uncanny and it was only through the guidance of an older mentor pupil that I prevented from running away.
Similarly for many learners the jump from Primary to Secondary schooling or from there to Colleges or Universities can be uncanny experiences, in particular if one’s friends are not also attending the same institution – loneliness is not restricted to virtual spaces.. Sometimes this isolation can trigger the sense of spookyness and many physical places provide this perception.
For me a VLE now is not uncanny (as it may have been all those years ago when I did my first online course on OU’s FirstClass) but to some extend a reassuringly homely place. My WordPress blogging space now feels homely, as does my video site on Fliggo but strangely this does not apply to Twitter. Second Life nor del.icio.us,
Is it the lack of perceived community in those spaces which is disturbing, the lack of adequate embodiment, the absence of ‘textual reassurance’ for a person with a clear ‘linguistic’ learning modality, or even the sense of ‘unproductivity’.
One thing is for certain it can’t be lack of familiarity as I have used those tools for a number of months, if not years.
This failure of acceptance of some learning tools by a technophilic educator might in itself be ‘uncanny’..

Bayne, S. (forthcoming, March 2010). Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies. London Review of Education.

A particular aspect of K. Hayles’ paper ‘Unfinished Work – From Cyborg to Cognisphere’ made me think:
on p.164  she ponders over co-evolutionary processes in which fundamental changes in the design in two unrelated areas such as biology and culture can have a profound effect on the evolutionary fitness of the organism, in this case H. sapiens.
She was of course referring to the the evolution of bipedalism and the opposing thumb, with the latter of course being associated with the advent of manual dexterity allowing the creation of simple stone tool and other artefacts.

In a further example she described another investigtion by Ambrose (2001)  an anthropologist who was researching the emergence of compound tools, consisting of for example wood, stone or horn tight together to a single instrument with plant fibrous material. He argues that the evelopment of this skill has been occuring at the same time as the accelerated development of an area of the brain (Broca’ aresa associated with language development.
He speculates that the particular skills invovled in complex tool making such as sequential and hierachical ordering of elements (stone sharpening first, handle making next, treating fibres next etc.) is also a quintessential way of learning a language. and as a result the two may have driven each other in a co-evolutionary spiral.
Tentative as this statement may be and there is little evidence to proof this it sheds some interesting light on current thinking on human-technology interaction, cyborg-type.
Are we now at a stage where the two are becoming so intertwined that one (human mental capacity) drives the ‘evolution’ of the other (complexity of technology), with the possibility of a positive feedback loop.
Clearly speech turned out to be the transformative skill over the last 20,000 years or so - and tool making remained a necessary but secondary side issue; what will dominante the current co-evolutionary event?

Ambrose, SH (2001) Paleolithic Technology and Human Evolution; Science 291 (5509), 1748-53
Hayles, NK (2006) Unfinished Work – From Cyborg to Cognisphere 23 (7-8), 159-166

It occurred to me (and probably others) that the description of a Cyborg in the media is usually defined as a alpha-males with superhuman capabilities, as for example portayed in Frankenstein, Roy Batty in Bladerunner and in The Matrix.
On the other hand Androids tend to appear rather on the female spectrum, often representing and satisfying male sexual phantasies of beauty and youth, perhaps most signified in the creation of Japanese robots called Fembots.

Is this asymmetry in the public portrayal of human/machine interaction another piece of evidence of gender bias transgressing into the virtual modern creative arts and engineering design?

On another note:
I was pleased to learn that when listening to Katherine Hayles on YouTube, that she has been in her previous professional life employed as a Chemist by Xerox and IBM, before moving into her current field of research.
She appears to be a rather rare example of a cross-cultural Doppel-Ganger, moving effortlessly between the natural and social sciences; bless her.
BTW does this make her a special subspecies of a  ’cyborg’?

This week has been shaped by a desperate attempt to identify a topic suitable for the digital essay assignment.
The initial choice was based on L. Grieves article on ‘How material are cyberbodies’ but unfortunately after some further probing for content it did not yield (at least in my view) sufficient material of substance.
In general I found several of the primary articles in our reading list not only hard to read but virtually incomprehensible, as exemplified by D. Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’.
It found it heavily politicised and abstract, which did not go well together with my rational fact-based way of thinking.
I do accept that it is one of the genre’s key articles, but unless one has a sociological/ philosophical mindset this paper is at such an advanced level that for a novice (immigrant) into this area it is beyond reasonable comprehension (and my wife can certify to this).
Kathryn Hayles’ way of writing, whilst still hard, was easier to follow and if at all I will try to centre my digital essay around one of her themes, the Cybersphere. Whether it will come to anything only time will tell.

The Cybersphere Project

Reading Kathryne Hayles’ paper on ‘Unfinished Work: from Cyborg to Cognisphere’ a few interesting thoughts were precipitated.
Cognisphere is a term first coined by T. Whalen in 2000..
In Walen’s and Hayles’ definition of Cognisphere information transfer moves beyond the boundaries of Human to Machine (and vice versa) but instead embraces the information flow at a ’systems level’, the system being the entire planet, society at large and the as the medium the entire electromagnetic wave spectrum.
In this ‘holistic view’ the cognisphere becomes an extension of the currently experienced social and environmental spheres with the opportunity of lifting human consciousness to new heights, as expressed by Hayles (2006): ’the cognisphere gives a name and shape to the globally interconnected cognitive systems in which humans are increasingly embedded.’
Maybe this topic is worth further investigations, possibly as part of the Digital Essay project?
References:
Hayles, H.K. (2006) Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere. Theory, Culture, Society 23(7-8), 159-166
Whalen, T. (2000) ‘Data Navigation, Architecture of Knowledge’; paper presented at the Banff Summit on Living Architecture: Designing for Immersion and Interaction, Banff New Media Institute, 23 Sept.

After having done some of the readings I shall now make an attempt to present some thoughts on the above definitions:
Standard definition has it that the cyborg is an entity, a hybrid between human and machine, with the limitations of current technology putting it more on the human side than machine – but this may change. Given the penetration of technology in modern day society it may be assumed that in its broadest sense we’re all cyborgs, one way or the other.
Donna Haraway (2006) extends this view into the area of philosophy and politics, stating the cyborg to be ‘a condensed image of both imagination and material reality’. Furthermore she perceives cyborgs as ‘illegitimate offsprings of militarism and patriarchical capitalism’, a view which possibly ignores the potentially useful advances in medicine. .
The emergence of cyborgs for her are a reflection of the ‘techno-centric, male-dominated  and oppressive societies of the late 20^th century’, She portrays both a dystopian view of cyborg worlds as ‘the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet ….., the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinistic orgy of war, and the utopian version of  a cyborg world where people would not be afraid of their kinship with animals and machines,, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory statements.
Kathrine Hayles (2006) in her acticle tries to dissect the meaning of post-humanism. She describes posthuman as a ‘ historically specific and contingent term rather than a stable ontology’. She contrasts this with humanism, associated with the Enlightenment, of the human being with rationality and free will. In her view posthumanism is thus a transient form between our humanistic past and what she calles ‘Regime of Computation’.

References:
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. (2006). Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere. Theory Culture Society, 23 (7-8), 159-166.

Her article suggests that Cartesian mind/body dualism may be apparent and recognised in other ways, beyond the traditional cyborg concept. As an example Hayles details the detached perceptions anorexic individuals have towards their bodily features as an example of pre-cybernetic disembodiment – and I may add the same may be said about transsexual behaviour. Both of these human characteristics are indicative of the distinctness of the mind over its bodily manifestation.
Seen from a biological point of view this may implicate the human body as a (temporary) vehicle of the mind, in the same way as the body is a (transient) vehicle of genes. Just as genes use the body in order to be replicated and passed on (the Selfish Gene hypothesis) the human mind may be used by memes to be replicated by imitation and disseminated across a society.
Would this imply that the human body is nothing more than a stage for the two actors  to engage in a pas-de-deux? And would the two actors be equal or would one (the gene) influence and shape the other (the mind)?

Returning to Hayles’ and her depiction of humans as a ‘we as autonomous agents operating together to make a self’. As an example Hayles mentions her ‘sleep and food agents’ determining her behaviour; going even further to suggest that in thinking this way one is beginning to transform into a ‘posthuman collectivity’.
This disaggregated view of the human mind is co-incidentally extended by the experimental work of prosthetic cybernetic researchers such as Kevin Warwick who attempts to link his own somatic and cranial neural network using peripheral electronic devices in the shape of integrated circuits with the outside world to allow him to interact, control and manipulate computers or even objects physically. In his more recent research he also attempts to manipulate people with his mind and to broaden his range of senses to include the perception of ultrasound.

This is likely to be cutting edge cyborg research but will it lead to post-humanism?

I have to admit I am rather intrigued after having read Katherine Hayles treatise on ‘Towards embodied Virtuality’ second time round.

The essay presents not only a history of the perception of the Cybernetic Evolution but also illuminates the many facets of this topic from a number of different perspectives.

When reading it one cannot resist putting the article away several times and reflecting on the deeper connotations it raises.

The first point I would like to address is the statement of information as a (disembodied) entity flowing between carbon-based organic and silicon-based inorganic components.
Within this particular context information is defined more broadly then given by Wiener later on who states that information is information and not matter or energy.
I would rather define it as ‘instructional code’.
Within this context nature as evolved several layers of code:

The code of the (i) physical sciences in the shape of the quantum gravitational field, (ii) the  code of the atomic chemical world made up of the strong, weak and electromagnetic field forces, the code for biological including human life via the genetic (triplet) code and (iv) finally the binary code of the electronic age.
Each one of these stages has its own embodiment event in the form of (i) space-time and hydrogen, (ii) a multitude of molecules, (iii) cellular life including humans and finally in (iv) cyborgs and androids.
Given this assumption we could see humans already as embodied information and any electronic addition will only move this aspect onto a higher level, with the additional information just being packaged in a different format.

I will need to think this a bit more through and put it in context with other aspects of K. Hayles’ paper.

The last few days have seen a flurry of activity from my side – but sadly not on the MSc discussion board or WordPress blog but in the area of job hunting or recruitment.
Yesterday I have been serving on an interviewing panel (all day) for the recruitment of a learning technologist for another institution, tomorrow it is my turn to be interviewed for an Associate Lectureship at the Open University.
Although I hope that this course and module has put me in good stead to give it a good bash there is still ample to do to fine tune my case to fit into the OU online teaching and learning model.
I am not sure to what extent the use of technology has pervaded distance learnng at the OU although having listened to Martin Bean’s (the new OU Vice Chancellor’s) talk at ALT-C I would like to believe that this is now very much the case. Having said this nothing beats good old online pedagogy, with the use of technology playing second fiddle – we’ll see.
Below is a video of Martin’s inspirational talk at ALT-C.
http://alt-c.blip.tv/file/2612978/