Damien's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

Antipodality is the experience of (dis) location – of being neither here nor there but both here and there – created by vectors of transnational and globalised communication – Usher and Edwards.

In the same way that the antipodal nature of the elements that made up the Protocols of the Elders of Zion allowed it to flourish, the same trick allowed the Pyramid of Learning to replicate and replicate. A lifestream could be similarly misunderstood – it’s aggregation of disparate elements seeming to give credence to a flawed narrative.

So how do we sift through the lifestream? How do we tag and categorise the data? We require a means, a technology or a filter through which to ensure that we engage with content external to the walls of the learning institution in a critical way.

Again from Usher and Edwards:

… universities are less able to control access to knowledge when it increasingly takes the form of information circulating through networks outside the control of eduational institutions. With these developments comes a need to think anew about what constitutes research and it’s relationship with pedagogy and learning.

So what are the tell-tale signs? What digital winks can enable us to spot when a narrative constructed from a cyborg pedagogy is in danger of being driven by what we might call ‘conspiracist thinking’?

If this is the nature of a cyborg pedagogy, then what questions should a learner within a pedagogy of multi-located, digitally mediated narratives be encouraged to ask?

Go to Part 8