Summary Week 12
Boundaries. The lifestream makes you think about boundaries between:
- My text and the texts that I have fed into my lifestream
- Me and my audiences – who am I meant to be? Academic writer or blogger?
- My thoughts and the sanctioned knowledge of academic publications
All of these boundaries seem to be breached in the lifestream. If as Usher and Edwards (1998) state that postmodern pedagogy was about bounding out, cyborg pedagogy appears to be about holism, about enabling more voices to have a say and in so doing, enabling learners to make, to a certain extent, what they will of the learning ‘opportunities’ offered to them (Usher and Edwards, 1998).
However, this begs the question: how to assess lifestreams? I am wondering, just as this (wonderful) artefact is a novel exemplification and process of learning, its assessment methods may be just as novel. Will you assess me on my use of academic discourse? If so, is that fair as I am blogging, and that discourse is far more informal. Will I be penalised for that? Will you assess me for my skills with the digital applications that I have been asked to incorporate into the lifestream – the digital artefact and the ethnography? If so, is that fair as I am still a novice with these tools. Will you be assessing me on account of the number and variety of feeds I have linked into the lifestream? If that is the case, then I am being assessed on hoop-jumping, and my lifestream is not, for me, about just doing what is expected. That has been a tough part of this endeavour for me: making something personal – and the lifestream is my personal artefact as well as an assessment artefact – fit into the bigger picture: the bigger picture being the academic context in which it has been written. Usher and Edwards (1998) cite Featherstone (1995) saying ‘in cyberspace practices, meanings are more readily negotiated by its users’ (p 4). However, is this artefact being assessed in cyberspace and according to the norms of cyberspace? Or is it assessed via the norms of the linear literacies of real life academia? McWilliam and Palmer (1995) cite Ulmer (1998, p 4) ‘to inquire into the future of academic discourse in the age of new technology we must include the possibility of a change not only in technology, but also in the ideology of the subject and forms of institutional practice’. I am not sure what type of institutional practice I am aiming to address – that of the real or the hyperreal.