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.
