I’ve been reading Sian’s manifesto on uncanny digital pedagogies.  I think it is really well structured and shows up very well which areas are affected and challenged by digital culture. She describes how being put into strange environments, being estranged from yourself through a disonance of body and soul, and having to re-think authenticity puts students into a position of awquardness and uncertainty. This will then lead the student to be more reflexive, radical and creative in thought and practice.

I was reading this text from the point of view of a language teacher and I was astonished how compatible a lot of the ideas are with the experience of learning a new language. Students can be put off the learning experience by this sense of awquardness they experience when being confronted with a new language. There are several strategies for teaching beginners in a foreign language, but the one that is considered most appropriate (well, not by everyone, but certainly by me), is total immersion.  This does challenge students to blank out a lot of what is essential to them. They can’t express themselves as they are used to and are forced to go back to a very primitive type of communication.

For me this works well in a face to face session as students can be encouraged a lot by smiles and body language and the teacher can also ensure that there is no distraction. In a digital envitoment for beginners you would need to put in plenty of visual cues, combine them with audios and make the whole thing quite authentic, so that they are experiencing a strange environment which challenges them and at the same time fascinates them and gives them the feeling they are successfully stepping into a new role (the role of the language speaker).

I wonder whether it might be possible to build a beginners’ lesson and combine it with footnotes that relate to the ideas we have been discussing in this course.

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