Bill's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

Lots of activity this week, in a number of directions, a fact that’s indicative of how stimulating this course has been for me so far. I watched a lot of videos by M. Wesch, Haraday and Baudrillard, started looking at some other of N.K. Hayles’ books, used Twitter mainly for relaying links for interesting papers, tools and conferences, delved deeper into Google Wave and started using it for collaboratively designing a seminar on new media for teachers, discovered a very cool, most definitely posthuman, museum exhibit titled Artefact H10515 and revisited a Simpsons episode that parodies Apple. If anything, all this varied activity hints at the many ways that digital technologies are affecting our culture.

McWilliam and Palmer’s paper on the importance of the teacher’s material presence in teaching reminded me of something a colleague once told me: “65% of all teaching is performance”. You might disagree with his percentage or dismiss him as a proponent of old-fashioned transmissive teaching methods, but anyone who has ever taught in a classroom understands there is at least a core of truth in that statement.

Distance/online learning disembodies not only the students but the teacher as well and raises a few interesting questions: Does teaching become harder without a material body? Can avatars and online profiles adequately substitute the material presence of the teacher? Does this material absence mean that there’s actually 65% less teaching in online learning. Or –the horror!– 65% less learning?

If you’re looking for quick answers, I’d say: Yes / No / Not 65%, but there’s certainly less “teaching” and more “facilitating” / Certainly not, but this is also a matter of effective course design. But the real question is this: are we heading towards a postcyborg pedagogy in which the material teacher or the human teacher will be completely obsolete? One imagines the bodies of teachers being exhibited in future museums or freak-shows (”See a teacher from the past! Marvel at the inner workings of a primitive teaching machine!), embalmed, or plastinated and dissected like the poor corpses of Gunther von Hagens. At the core of this concern lies the fear that several other professions have experienced or are experiencing right now, the fear that digital technology will make us redundant, obsolete. But I feel that the real challenge here is not just our survival but our adaptation to the needs of the digital era for the benefit of our students.

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

Inner workings

The readings by Usher and Bayne on uncanny, dislocated pedagogies triggered a reverse engineering process in my mind and allowed me to lift the lid and examine the inner workings of our course. Among the cogs and wheels I can now see:

All this “embodied absence” and “disembodied presence” involves students “in an uncanny move toward the posthuman” but also hurtles the university out of its comfort zone and into the dislocated space of ontological uncertainties. It will be nice to see whether the new pedagogies emerging from such instructional designs will stand the test of time or whether they will fade and become ghosts themselves, just as VLEs are now regarded as… well, dead.

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

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

This week was largely devoted to the readings by Dona Haraway (“A Cyborg Manifesto”) and N. Katherine Hayles (“Towards embodied virtuality” and “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere”) and to philosophical questions on what being posthuman is.

I can’t say I became a fan of Haraway; her much-praised (and much-criticised) article now shows its age and was too dense for me. I had to turn to a number of summaries and interpretations by other scholars in order to make it accessible.

And while Haraway convincingly argues that the power of the cyborg as a metaphor cannot be fully seen in the limiting context of utopic/dystopic binaries and that it lies in the transgression of boundaries, Hayles shockingly states that the cyborg is out-of-date. Hayles places the cyborg in the mythological pantheon that contains the centaur and other “augmented human” fantasies or scenarios. In a world where even your tea-kettle will soon have wi-fi, the cyborg is “not networked enough”.

ArteFact H10515

Cyberspace, on the other hand, has certainly not died but has evolved (or is that mutated?) into the cognisphere (or “noosphere” from the Greek word νους, i.e. noesis, intellect), which has “[e]xpanded to include not only the Internet but also networked and programmable systems that feed into it, including wired and wireless data flows across the electromagnetic spectrum”. The cognisphere, a sort of Cyberspace 2.0 with a hint of The Matrix, “gives a name and shape to the globally interconnected cognitive systems in which humans are increasingly embedded. As the name implies, humans are not the only actors within this system; machine cognizers are crucial players as well.”

It is certainly an indication of profound change when powerful popular metaphors mutate or become obsolete. But while we’re busy observing how the material and digital worlds around us evolve every day, perhaps we should take a moment to consider a couple of philosophical questions: If embodiment is not essential to human being and consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, as Hayles mentions, are we just informational processes? And if yes, doesn’t this mean that we’re not just actors within the cognisphere but also mere props, mere “data flows” in a stream of myriads? Finally, if “‘human’ and ‘posthuman’ coexist in shifting configurations”, is this co-existence symbiotic or parasitic?

* Haraway, D. (2000). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. in D Bell and A Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge.

* Hayles, N.K. (1999). Toward embodied virtuality, chapter 1 of How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. pp1-25.

* Hayles, N.K. (2006). Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere. Theory Culture Society, 23/7-8.

I didn’t notice how this week flew by. I spent a lot of hours working on my ethnographic report (and judging by what I’ve seen so far, so did everybody else on theirs). At the same time I started warming up to Twitter again, as it seems to be a great source of links and resources. A lot of the people I follow seem to use it as a real-time social networking tool, although I am positive it was not built for this purpose. Twitter has largely contributed to the Nowism trend. A Trendwatcher.com definition for the term reads as follows:

“NOWISM | “Consumers’ ingrained lust for instant gratification is being satisfied by a host of novel, important (offline and online) real-time products, services and experiences. Consumers are also feverishly contributing to the real-time content avalanche that’s building as we speak. As a result, expect your brand and company to have no choice but to finally mirror and join the ‘now’, in all its splendid chaos, realness and excitement.””

This all important “NOW” moment seems to be partly about instant gratification and partly about anxiety. Are we growing too impatient? In my RL I am a very patient person but during the time I spend online I demand faster input, a more rapid exchange of images and ideas.

Perhaps this has to do with the fact that most of us have too many things to do on the web on a daily basis and too many balls to juggle. We need a faster rate of technological convergence, we need more mash-ups and more services that combine services we already use. In MacWorld 2007, the now hugely successful iPhone was presented by Steve Jobs as “three revolutionary products. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.” And in 2009, Google announced GoogleWave, a tool that was promoted as a new incarnation of e-mail but in essence is an e-mail client, a chat tool and a multi-wiki all rolled into one semi-attractive package.

But perhaps nowism also betrays a fear of death, an acknowledgement of our mortality (“so many tools, so little time”), which is also evident in our long-lasting fascination with the mechanical augmentation of the human body and the creation of Cyborgs. We might have become posthuman in a variety of ways, but we are still tied to our material aspect.

Posthuman MSc students

In our ultimate fantasy, when cyborg-technology overwhelms our biology, mortality won’t be an issue anymore. Paradoxically, while we dream of becoming robot-like, popular culture is full of robots who wish to become “human”. Even cyborgs get the existential blues and once more the grass is greener on the other side.

Neurons

Informational pathways? Check.

Reflexivity? Check.

Autopoiesis? Check.

Is our course… alive?!

A couple of weeks ago I finally resigned to the fact that I had to buy a small A-Z notebook and record all my social media user-ids and passwords. I now have profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, my WordPress blog, Ning and EduSpaces, as well as accounts is Del.icio.us, Wikipedia, YouTube, Library Thing, Diigo, Digg, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Vimeo, SlideShare, Second Life and a few more services. Using these services and making sure my profile is up to date takes a lot of time but also raises important questions: a) How much of my “self” do I project onto each of my online presences? b) Do I switch into slightly different personas depending on the media I am going to use? (In other words, will you find exactly the same Bill on Facebook and YouTube?) c) How does this multi-point activity affect my sense of a coherent self?

To be honest, I feel fragmented. In terms of temporal constraints, my sense of fragmentation is best described by a Greek saying that’s literally translated as “I had to cut myself to a thousand pieces in order to take care of everything”. But it’s not just a time issue; I am aware that a lot of overlapping but ultimately different parts of who I am are up on the Net, yet I still don’t feel that there is a social media on which I have a profile that is fully representative of myself. K.N. Hayles claims that the “I” of the posthuman has been “transformed into the ‘We’ of autonomous agents operating together to make a self”. In that sense, digital culture has amplified and upgraded our vision of own self as a “collectivity”. And although my various Web 2.0 “selves” are not exactly “autonomous” (I hope!), they do have their own needs and their own agendas.

As the time we spend online increases, our sense of a posthuman self will grow stronger. Hayles suggests that “‘human’ and ‘posthuman’ coexist in shifting configurations”; I wonder at what point will the scales be tipped and our posthuman self will be the dominant one.

Or has this already happened…?

Hayles, N.K. (1999). Toward embodied virtuality, chapter 1 of How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. pp1-25

“I used to grow lentils in yogurt cups in grade school” FaceBook group with 68,000+ members.
Is this a community?

This was a week almost entirely devoted to researching virtual ethnography and online communities. The anthropological aspect of ethnographic work always fascinated me in the same way I find traveling to a foreign country fascinating. In order to ethnographise a community you have to meet the natives and attempt to communicate in their language, observe their practices, learn about their customs, understand their common goals and their shared trials and tribulations. And although there are some fundamental common elements present in every community, god is once more in the details, in the minute (or sometimes not so minute) things that set each community apart from the others. In a way, one cannot hope to write an ethnographic report about a community without first acquiring a community-specific literacy, the ability to interpret, understand and analyse the inner workings of the community and workaday practices of its members. Is this something the aspiring ethnographer can hope to achieve in the short space of ten days? Our reports will show; but I have the feeling you either need to be an insider or you need to spend a lot more time studying the community.

Other than that, I continued to catalogue my Web 2.0 / new media books in LibraryThing, created a comic to express my frustration about the ridiculously huge number of great Web 2.0 tools available for educators and started contemplating a visit to the 2010 Learning Technologies exhibition in London. Anybody else thinking of going?