Posts Tagged ‘uncanny’

In conclusion…

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

Early thoughts on the course structure were often of distraction, frustration and the urge to ‘throw in the towel’ which had to be resisted.

“I’m not yet sure that my Lifestream will eventually portray an objective picture of my involvement with digital culture and I don’t see lifestreaming as a mash-up … but I’m willing to give it a decent try.” Bill Babouris Blog entry 30/09/09

Many battled with the technology but swift intervention by tutors helped, though more in-depth textual support at the outset in the course guides would have been useful, with screenshots to help the less technologically-advanced students.

Using the lifestream to assess strangeness is to demonstrate the disjointed and spectral nature of our studies, and the lack of boundaries was noted:

“@damiendebarra working with barriers can be comforting as well as restrictive. total freedom can be a scary place!” @sarahp 22/09/09

However, collating  these resources in the lifestream creates the familiarity that Bayne seeks to avoid.  It may demonstrate the “learning process as volatile, disorientating and invigorating” (Bayne, 2010: pg 8), but surely putting everything together gives us as learners our own VLE?

Having completed the course I would have to state emphatically that I believe this course has succeeded in demonstrating discomfort as a learning method. This has been the most challenging, infuriating and ultimately rewarding course of study that I have ever undertaken.

“Predictability and certainty become less the norm and paralogy, or the acceptance of dissensus and conflict in what constitutes knowledge, is more readily seen as a positive value” (Usher 1998: pg1)

When something is strange and disjointed I believe that you intensify your focus to make sense of it. It is in man’s nature to impose order on the world, to find patterns, as he regards the stars and reforms them into the image of gods. This takes imagination and deliberation and what Usher calls “multi-disciplinarity, multi-literacies and transcoding, and ‘imaginative’ skills to gather information and connecting it together in new ways” (pg 1)

The uncanny allows us to manipulate existing and accepted knowledge to create new knowledge.

References Used

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The theory of uncanny pedagogies and how one online course is attempting to use technology to promote discomforted learning. By Sarah Payne

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

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

Confusion

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Week 11 Summary

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

Well we are into the final week of the lifestream so I imagine that this will be my last summary before the ‘final’ entry next weekend, and I  have to say that I will be rather sad to see this end.

At first I did not respond well to the lifestream. I found it fiddly to set up (whilst also suffering from a bout of the flu) and I thought it was a bit ‘gimmicky’ for my liking; simply an example of introducing the ‘latest thing’ to show how terribly modern this course is. (no offence intended to Jen & Sian!)

However as I have moved on through the course I can see how incredibly useful it is as a learning tool. This course has been designed (we have discovered over the last week or two) to unnerve we poor learners, and take us out of the warm, comforting embrace of the VLE, and set us free (or simply unleashed) in the uncanny, haunted realm of cyberspace. And all to see if we sink or swim! ( my apologies for mixing a few metaphors there).

I have spent some time going through the early entries on my lifestream to prepare or the close next weekend and it has reminded me of some of the great content we have discovered, as well as recording the path of my own learning. Often links are added because they are simply in the news that week, but often they reflect the topic of discourse for that week.

So the content in my lifestream this week has mainly been in preparation for my assignment. Again I have been making extensive use of Tumblr to collect together quotes applicable to my assignment as I re-read some of the earlier papers for this module. It is strange how only a difference of a few weeks can put a completely different slant on some things that I thought I understood earlier in the course. Looking back at them through the lens of additional reading gives some of it a whole new meaning!

I have been reading up on our uncanny digital pedagogies, as well as collecting tutorial and tips for possible media I may be using in my assessment. I have also published details of my assignment- though I was initially unsure of the appropriateness of this early on, but as others seem to be happy to do it I felt it would be rude not to join in! It looks like there are going to be some interesting work done across the course and I hope we will get to see some of it at a later date. I have also posted a blog on whether my delivery method would be considered academic enough. I had initial thought about producing a hypertext essay, but I wanted to push the boundaries a little more on this uncanny course. This may of course turn around and bite me!

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Further thoughts on Bayne and a place of ghosts

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Well I have finished the reading now and wanted to comment on some other elements not covered in my last post. I wanted to talk about ghosts.

So who are the ghosts?

The answer is – we create the ghosts and we are the ghosts!

“The ghost… is a figure who is both without body and out of their own natural time, and hence unsettled on two counts” (Bayne on Hook 2005)

As Bayne points out, when joining a site like Facebook:

“ we are invariably invited – almost as a first step – to ‘upload an image’, to duplicate ourselves visually”

That duplication creates the ghost.

We also become disconnected from those avatars in the sense that they continue to exist even when we are not connected. Think of ‘Numa Numa man’ and the ‘StarWars kid’ – their online personas have been taken, mutated (mutilated?) and sent on around the world without their permission or even compliance.

“we scatter our ‘bodies’ across the web where they gain a kind of independence as nodes for commentary, connection and appropriation by others  into new networks and new configurations.”

But are these avatars truly shadows, or are they simply representations of distilled personality with the dull (and irrelevant) bits removed? If you where to scoop up all of my virtual ‘ghosts’ and squish them back together, would you get a true representation of me as a rounded human being? Or would there still be ‘bits’ missing that leaves me looking 2D and a little transparent?

Using the lifestream to assess strangeness

The purpose seems to be to demonstrate the spectral nature of our studies by showing just how disjointed our work is. However, surely bringing all of these sources together creates the familiarity that Bayne seems to seek to avoid? It may demonstrate the “learning process as volatile, disorientating and invigorating” (Bayne pg 8), but surely putting everything together gives us as learners a framework to ‘hang our learning hats on’. It allows us to build a single virtual identity out of our multiple ‘faces’ in Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Tumblr etc. The act of drawing them together knits it all together in a nice safe comforting blanket.

Reference

S Bayne Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies

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Early thoughts on Bayne

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

I am currently working my way through S Bayne Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies, and I am enjoying it so far. I am still bringing these ideas together into a coherent space, but for now I want to talk about some of the quotes that have jumped out at me so far and that I feel I have really connected with:

“For in working online as teachers and learners, we are working in ‘destabilized’ classrooms, engaging in spaces and practices which are disquieting, disorienting, strange, anxiety-­‐inducing, uncanny.” S Bayne pg 2

This definitely spoke to me of my own experiences early on in this module which is illustrated in my week 1 summary. I found the early weeks extremely ‘anxiety -inducing’ simply because it felt so strange. Many of the MSc elearning modules encourage us to manage our own learning, but there is always a framework in place for us to to ‘hang our learning hat’ from. But not here! No comfortable wardrobe to follow instruction, not even a rusty nail to hang our learning from. Complete freedom – a very scary concept!

“to make the unfamiliar familiar, to ‘normalise’ to an extent the uncanniness of the digital text”

I wonder if this is why I still print out all of the course readings, and make notes on them in biro. Is this me ‘normalising’ by turning the virtual into pen and ink reality?

Bayne quotes Meyer and Land (2005) stating that:

“the insights gained when the learner crosses the threshold [into understanding] might also be unsettling, involving a sense of loss”

I am not sure about this. When I pass over the threshold from not understanding to understanding (experienced recently after some help with Haraway), I find it is like a light going on in my head. I feel a sense of relief, and release, but in a positive sense, not release in terms of losing something.

“Teaching inthis vision becomes focused on ‘the production of human capacities… for the personal assimilation and creation of strangeness’:

“Such a conception of ‘teaching’ looks to a fundamental break with conventional pedagogical relationships and look to curricula that present awkward spaces to and for students. Through such spaces, they will realize for themselves their capacities for assimilating and even for producing strangeness.” (Barnett 2005)”

When I read this I thought “ahhhh! I see why they have done this all to us now!” The initial ’strangeness’ of this course has been aimed at forcing us to think ’strangely’ and produce our own ’strangeness’! An example of this would be the early piece of work that we all created for the digital artefacts. Giving us very little in the way of guidance, and not having the opportunity to really discuss it face to face ensured that we all produced completely different artefacts. With no preconception of what was expected, we all let our imaginations roam and generated some weird and wonderful output. If we had seen examples prior to creating them, I am sure that it would have influenced what was generated and the results would have been far less interesting.

Bayne quotes Barnett (2007) when describing students as being:

“asked to submit to the strangeness of new worlds opening before her. If they were not strange worlds there would be question marks over whether we were in the presence of higher education, (pg7)

Is Barnett suggesting  that this is the point of higher education? Is it called ‘higher’ because we expect to see higher reasoning and higher brain function as a result? This also suggests to me that all education prior to this could be classified as ‘lower education’.

So far the sense that I am getting from this piece is how discomfort is thought to encourage original thinking. I am not sure about this yet – perhaps I need to find myself a cold,wet piece of concrete to sit on and think… would that be uncomfortable enough?

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