End-of-lifestream summary

What is a lifestream?

The lifestream functions as a diary of a student’s electronic life (Freeman and Gelernter, quoted in Wikipedia) and in this course it also demonstrated “engagement with the academic themes and content of the course” (Course Guide, p.8).

Categories of my lifestream
Looking back over my lifestream, my entries can be divided into several categories which I have ordered roughly according to the associated workload:

a)      Blog entries
The blog is probably the most reflexive part of the lifestream. For me this is an extremely valid category in terms of evaluation, as it demonstrates authentic writing which needs to be presented clearly. Some of my blog posts are notes and comments on the readings. The other blog posts are end-of-week summaries which describe my work and my thoughts.

b)      Own creations
The visual artefact and ethnography led to some anxiety on my part, but were very rewarding in terms of the learning process and of the discussion that resulted from them.

c)      Communications as comments
This feed encouraged students to communicate with one another. Compared to Twitter the advantage of the comment function was that there was no word limit and you could focus directly on other student’s work. The disadvantage was that the dialogue usually ended after one response. In this respect tweetdeck was better at stimulating discussion.

d)      Twitter contributions
Twitter contributions helped to give a fun impression of the other members. I’m glad I got a chance to try this medium out. I think it would have worked better if the word count was less restricted.

e)      Media contributions linked to the course content (Photos, videos, articles, useful websites from the internet)
As multimodality is closely linked to digital culture it makes sense to encourage students to draw in a wide range of media for the course. I have fed in interesting videos and pictures which I have found or which others have recommended, as well as useful tools for the artefact and ethnography.

f)        Media contributions linked to my work
As a language teacher I constantly use videos and images. They were uploaded automatically when I stored them in Diigo. I have left some of these as evidence of digital culture in the workspace. This maybe pushes the lifestream slightly into the chaos region (Ross, 2009), but for me it is all linked, as the course content has increased my confidence when using digital media for my work.

Limitations of the lifestream

I felt the lifestream was quite demanding on the students. Maybe the statement that there should be “evidence of new material every day or so” could be rephrased for part-time students. I sometimes felt frustrated about having to constantly prove that I am engaging with the contents. I personally need time away from the computer to gather my thoughts, and I didn’t want to produce feeds just for the sake of feeding the lifestream.
I can also imagine the lifestream is very time-consuming to assess.

Positive aspects of the lifestream

Despite the limitations, I do think the lifestream is a great tool to ensure consistency of engagement. Particularly when linked with feedback it motivates students to demonstrate a variety of engagement and gives a very full and retrievable picture of the student’s work.

Course Guide: E-Learning and Digital Culture (2009), MSc in E-Learning, The University of Edinburgh.

Ross, J. (2009). Lifestream: Curation or Chaos? (A conversation between Jen and Sian), http://digitalculture-ed.net/?paged=3, accessed on 11/12/2009.

Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestream, accessed on 11/12/2009.

This is nearly the last week of the semester and I’ve been trying to find a topic and some idea of a structure for the final essay. I’ve been uploading some of pages from the websites I want to work with onto the lifestream and posted some thoughts on the essay. It’s a bit sad that interaction with the other students in the course always slows down when people are working on their final essays, but with the lifestream you can at least have a look into peoples blogs and lifestreams to get a bit more of an idea of what they are doing.

I need to start editing my lifestream and give some thought on the final summary, but I think I’m going to leave that til quite late and concentrate on getting a bit further with the final essay first. These weeks before Christmas are always so full of social activities – which I really enjoy – but it’s even harder than usual to find time for everything.

I’d like to do the final essay on “Online language courses in the digital age”

I’m drawn towards this topic because I’d like to investigate online courses a bit closer and I’d like to see how they fit in with the ideas of cyborg pedagogy and multimodality which we’ve been discussing in this course.

I’m thinking of using a wiki to present the essay, so I can link up to webpages or screenshots which I’m referring to. This would also make it easier to explain terms by hyperlinking.

I’d be focussing on two particular language courses and the central question I’d be asking would be “How do these online languages courses fit in with cyborg pedagogy and demands for multimodality?”

My structure could be as follows:

1. The digital age: What does this mean? (Notion of cyborgs, multimodality)

2. How has pedagogy changed? (Notion of cyborg pedagogy, increased multimodality in learning materials)

3. The cyborg pedagogy, multimodality and language learning.

4. Examples of two online language courses with particular focus on multimodality and cyborg pedagogy.
a) visual aids
b) audio aids
c) speaking cues
d) writing cues
e) presentation of grammar
f) building a community
g) the uncanny

5. Summary: Strengths and weaknesses of these two online language courses. How can they be utilized best?

I’d be really pleased to receive comments about these ideas.

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.

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]

This week I’ve been discovering a few new ideas for myself:

1. I’ve still been looking at some of the ethnographies. The great variety of these seem to show up some facts about the internet that we had been dealing with from the start: The virtual communities have utopian elements (such as bringing people together who share the same interestes; or for being sites of communication for action groups or groups with the same hobbies; for being a place to share your problems; for sharing and developing knowledge). But they also have dystopian elements (friendship or community might be offered under false pretensions such as trying to lure you somewhere or for trying to get  commercial information; identities might be false and messages invented; people might disinterested in one another). All these elements would also exist in real life communities but the virtual world does make it easier to form wider networks.

2. Two different strands of looking at our new relationship to technology seem to be emerging. On the one hand we have Haraway’s theory of a new cyborg being, a new variant of humankind striving towards disembodiment. On the other hand Gies is saying that cyberselves merely offer a new layer to our identities. Hayles seems to be somewhere in the middle as she argues that we are still embodied but our cognition has changed and is now far more networked.

3. I think it doesn’t really matter which perception we have – whether we totally identify with technology and feel like a cyborg, or whether we are just using technology to supplement our life. The question is really how to use technology in a way that gives us fulfilment and helps us to live and learn. Shields text “Flanerie for Cyborgs” identifies this need to bridge the different levels of technology and real life. As far as I understand, this text is highlighting the position of the Cyborg between the two states.

4. As teachers and students we are constantly juggling between real life and technology. We are constantly entwined between the two and we need to make use of both. For me as a teacher I want to reach my students on as many levels as possible and this means to acknowledge their digital worlds and needs as well as their real life worlds and needs. In the end we are always dealing with embodied people and we use technology to reach them better. Are we offering them the right balance, or too much technology or too little? How much technology actually helps them to learn, and how much of a distraction is it? Do they easily get distracted when learning on the computer? These are also things worth investigating.

Gies, L. (2008). How material are cyberbodies? Broadband Internet and embodied subjectivity. Crime Media Culture 4/3.

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.

Shields, R. (2006). Flânerie for Cyborgs. Theory Culture Society, 23/7-8.

Muri’s central argument against the idea of disembodiment seems to be that there is too much literal shit being produced for anyone to seriously think we are being disembodied. Obviously, she is right. We’re still here and there are more and more of us all the time. She is also touching on environmental issues with so many actual bodies being around.

It was quite a fun text to read as she does dismantle a lot of research as just being recyled stuff which has been around since Ancient Greek philosophy about the seperation of bodies and mind. I guess the logical consequence of this text is to stop producing texts which are saying the same old things and instead to address more pressing problems around the actual bodies, such as tackling environmental issues and issues of inequality.

I think again this leads to the old argument whether you view the connective qualities of technology as utopian in being a good medium to tackle these pressing problems which will be a matter of survival for humankind, or whether you think the internet is a dystopian vision where people are hiding from the real problems of humankind. Disembodiment in its most positive view would be a temporary act of joining forces, maybe through the internet, to tackle global problems, but also to increase communication.

Muri, A. (2003). Of Shit and the Soul: Tropes of Cybernetic Disembodiment in Contemporary Culture. Body & Society, 9/3.

My favourite quote of the day from Gies: “How material are cyberbodies? Broadband internet and embodied subjectivity”

“It is important to stress, however, that rather than taking us into entirely new directions, our ‘cyber selves’ (Aas, 2007) constitute merely an additional layer to already densely structured social identities.”

This seems to be in total contrast to the cyborg idea that creates a whole new vision of humankind.  Will need to think about this…

Gies, L. (2008). How material are cyberbodies? Broadband Internet and embodied subjectivity. Crime Media Culture 4/3.

This text is an argument for a view of the posthuman which is more networked. In this sense it continues the development from Hayles text “Toward embodied virtuality” where she was arguing for a collective sense of identity. Embodiment was a key issue of this earlier text and “a recognition that agency is always relational and distributed” and she viewed “cognition as embodied throughout human flesh and extended into the social and technological environment”

This text is a continuation of the previous text:

“At issue now (and in the past) are distributed cultural cognitions embodied both in people and their technologies.” (p.160).

She is introducing a fourth stage in her history of cybernetics which she calls “the Regime of Computation”. Central to this age is the global phenomenon of the “cognisphere”: “the globally interconnected cognitive systems in which humans are increasingly embedded” (p. 161)

Positive effects of the cognisphere:

- increased communication
- access to databases around the world
- communal knowledge-building through wikipedias and other data collection projects
- networking

Changes in subjectivity through the cognisphere:

- movement from deep attention to hyperattention
- dustributed cognitive systems that include human and non-human actors
- a dispersed sense of self
- artificial coginitive systems help to preserve and extend human awareness

Humans, animals and intelligent machines are more tightly bound together than ever.

Hayles believe that by using metaphors, such as “The regime of computation” we are influencing the evolution of ideas and technology: “What we make and what (we think) we are co-evolve together”. (p164).

The cognisphere is “multiple, not a split creature but a co-evolving and densely interconnected complex system”. (p.165)

My thoughts:

I’m still grappling with this one a bit. I find it hard to place the individual person / learner in this system. I suppose this is a process which began with the creation of different professions and specialisations. I rely on the knowledge of other people to live my life and can only survive through distribution of knowledge. I wouldn’t have the skills or knowledge to grow food, build a house, etc. But in the age of computation this development is continuing with the sharing of knowledge on the computer? Not sure whether I’m on the right track here…

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