This week has just zoomed by. I’ve been trying to get a grip on what is meant by cyborg pedagogy. I think this means taking into account the fact that we are inextricably bound to technology and using this to our and the students’ advantage when we teach.  Various texts from this week have been considering cyborg pedagogy:

Usher and Edwards have described how the internet has led to increased peer review of research. Authorship is problematised, universities lose their status as sole producers of knowledge. The WWW has created “networks, communities and identites that both locate and dislocate learners” (p.3). The cyborg as a hybrid creature calls for a restructuring of oppositions, such as “formal/ informal, teacher/ student, classroom/ home, print text/ electronic text.” Teaching and learning are now seen in terms of ‘links’ and ‘networks’. this calls for a learner-centred pedagogy, where the teacher helps to make the learning process explicit and transparent. While cyberspace is usually thought of as being democratic, “any democratising impulse will remain unrealised if learners are not stimulated to think critically about the impact on their learning of different technologies and the mediating processes that come with them” (p.5).

Bayne’s text considers an uncanny digital pedagogy which uses the uncertainty caused by displacement of place, body, and time and by the breaking up of the conventional text. These uncertainties are meant to lead to more creativity and rigour in lerning.

Angus et al. show that we create new ways of learning by investigating the ways we are all linked and networked. This can lead to a realisation of the fact that there are no boundaries and we are living in a world of connections, as described by Haraway. Again this leads to a new sense of collaboration and learning which is very distant from traditional forms of isolated knowledge.

McWilliam and Palmer also call for a pedeagogy which takes into account the fact that the teacher is no longer the body of knowledge and the student no longer has the role of being a body which is being filled with knowledge.  In contrast, the new ideal of pedagogy is to bridge the gaps between information which is available to everyone in the internet and to find new ways of teaching and learning making use of the human / technology interface/

Angus, T, Cook, I, Evans, J et al (2001) A Manifesto for Cyborg Pedagogy? International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, vol 10, no 2, pp.195-201.

Bayne, S. (forthcoming, March 2010). Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies. London Review of Education. [revised version uploaded 10 November 09]

McWilliam, E and Palmer, P. (1995). Teaching tech(no)bodies: open learning and postgraduate pedagogy. Australian Universities’ Review, 2.

Usher, R. and Edwards, R. (1998). Lost and found: ‘cyberspace’ and the (dis)location of teaching, learning and research. SCUTREA 1998, Exeter.

All of these texts are very enthusiastic about how cyberspace can be used to revolutionalise learning.  I’m still thinking about how to apply some of these ideas into my final essay.

My ideas for the final essay have shifted a bit since the last entry. Instead of building my own Beginners lesson I’d like to critically research online language courses which are already out there and find out how they fit in to ideas from this course, specifically the cyborg pedagogy, and multimodality.   This would be of professional interest to me, as students can be referred to these courses as an extention to their face to face sessions with greater confidence if I conclude that the courses are built well. However, I’d probably need to ensure that I don’t concentrate too much on the language side (even though I’d be very interested in this) and more on the broad pedagogical and digital issues that we have been working with in this course.

The two courses I’m thinking of working on are:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/german/lj/

The course from Deutsche Welle.

However, the second online course is password protected, so I’m not sure how linking this will work. I might have to work with screen shots in the actual essay.