Sarah's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

This piece is designed to supply the reader with a beginning and an end – but the route taken on this journey is decided by the reader.

The design pays homage to Kress and allows me to use new technologies to address “the relative power of author or reader” (2005: pg9). In conventional essays the reader is passive – following a path set by the author. Here I give control to the reader and allow them to choose their own path.

The topic is the uncanny nature of learning and specifically with reference to this course; the uncanny nature of the delivery should match the uncanny nature of the subject matter.

Introduction

As new media technologies become more part of everyday life, consumers experience a new type of reality that can be far removed from their lived existence.

“Ubiquitous computing disturbs the sense of physical location, extending and multiplying the body throughout the globe”  (Poster, 2002: pg758)

Poster (2002) argues that information media “transform(s) place and space in such a way that what has been regarded as the locus of the everyday can no longer be distinguished as separate from its opposite” (pg743)

We can no longer discern what is real.  The act of engaging in a new reality, for example, recreating a facet of personality in a personal journal (or blog), can blur the lines between reality and unreality. The author writes, and the creation can be “unapologetically confessional, a space where the self is carefully and painstakingly constructed and consumed”  (Bryson, 2008 :pg801) but it can be ‘consumed’ and manipulated by anyone else.

“Reliance on the familiar distinction between the public and the private becomes no longer possible, fundamentally upsetting the markers of freedom in each domain.” (Poster, 2002: Pg758)

This is a new experience for many. The digital narrative that individuals now inhabit online can be a strange, unstable and frenetic place.

“It is no doubt the case that when we work in internet environments, we work with technological spaces which are highly volatile, and which offer us new and potentially radical ways of communicating, representing and constituting knowledge and selfhood.” (Bayne and Ross, 2007: pg1)

This volatility leads us to feel disjointed and distracted – too much is happening and we may struggle to control the “sudden unfamiliarity of our textual and communicative practices (Bayne, 2010: pg2). This ‘uncanniness’ and sense of strangeness that this engenders causes the familiar to feel unfamiliar – we view our own reality in a altered fashion and often we cannot recognise it. In the wired world notions of time and place, the (un)reality of the body, and the source of knowledge is constantly challenged, where previously we have understood their nature.

“Each new reader in the electronic environment can her- or himself become a contributor/designer/writer; the lines between consumer and producer can be transgressed, blurred.”  (Carpenter, 2009: pg140)

This blurring of the lines  is a challenge to educators if they intend to embrace digital culture in academic practices:

“The university, its inhabitants and the project of teaching and learning are being rendered uncanny by the workings of digital technology” (Bayne, 2010: pg1).

This requires a new language/understanding on the part of academics as Usher points out, “Pedagogy can no longer be seen simply as the ‘authoritative’ transmission of canonical bodies of knowledge by research-based ‘experts’.”  (1998: pg1). Learners require more than being fed facts to be memorised and they expect to encounter knowledge using a multitude of methods and technologies:

“Learner-centred approaches are reflected in practices in which the instructor still defines largely what needs to be learned, but how that learning takes place and how it might be represented are things students are increasingly empowered to determine. Learning-centred approaches, finally, acknowledge that the world is changing”  (Brown and Peterson, 2009)

This approach empowers learners to manipulate their own learning, and maybe even the traditional Virtual Learning Environment has become too outmoded to fulfil this requirement.

Confusion