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.

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.

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.

This week I was struggling with the two core texts by Haraway and Hayles. I’ve been reading some of the blogs of other people in this course and this has helped me get my head round the ideas and think about what they mean for me.  I did find the texts very tough reading and part of me doesn’t really like the ideas they outline very much. (Part of me… I must be getting post-human).

I’m not sure I really like the metaphor of the cyborg. This is too much machine and too little human for me. Maybe I’m not immersed enough in technology, but I really value everything to do with real life far more than anything virtual. To me machines are there purely to help me do my work, stay in touch with people, learn better, etc. I’ve also never really got into science fiction. I can understand what Haraway is getting at to some extent and I agree that the philosophical idea of crossing boundaries of race and gender can be fascinating. As a “language person” however, I am constantly working with cultural ideas and heritage and I can’t imagine a scenario where this will not be important to people.

However, I am interested in the idea which both Hayles and Haraway have described of having a collective identity (whether you want to call this posthuman or cyborg). I know this is an idea which is very strongly linked to postmodernism (though I’m sure this idea has been around for a lot longer,  but maybe it is becoming more important in this era).  I think what is new in this text is that Hayles is using this concept to explain what happens in virtual environments and she is arguing that virtuality is just one facette of our identity, but still an embodied one. But even without any connection to machines it’s interesting to acknowledge how different we are in various surroundings and roles. Again, as a language teacher this is an important thought as learning a new language is linked to a new role and new outlooks in life. Language itself and the way we teach and learn it is also made up of so many different parts. It can be split up into reading, writing, speaking, listening, grammar, and in some ways it has to come together again, but with a different emphasis for every person and in every act of communication. There is a lot to think about here and I’d quite like to write my final essay on something to do with language and learning in the posthuman era.

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

Another pretty exhausting week gone by. At the beginning of the week I was working very hard on the ethnography. Again, my major problems were on the technological stage, I was really dreading this and had all sorts of hickups with converting pictures to slides and compression and all the rest. The thing is that everyone assumes I’m great at technology as I’m doing this course, but in actual fact I still find a lot of things very daunting. So, it’s great feeling now that I managed to get this up and running. I don’t think the lifestream properly portrays the amount of work that was put in this. While the lifestream is a nice tool to get everything together I’m starting to get a bit suspicious about how useful it will be for assessment. It’s very easy to “feed” it with tweets and things from tumblr, but you would have to read it quite carefully to actually find out how meaningful the entries are. A lot of work for the tutors…

Since finishing the ethnography I’m really enjoying reading the work of the others. It’s not only the contents which I find fascinating, but also how people have done this technically – a lot of things to learn from. I really like the peer reviews which is where the people on the course come together more closely and you more of a feeling of a “community” -  (in a nice sense).

This week the lifestream is mainly showing up the different applications and tools that I have been looking at in connection with the virtual ethnography. I have been thinking about this project a lot as well as trying to find ways of presenting it. The danger is to focus on the technology rather than on the contents, particularly if you are a bit intimidated by the technology. I’ve been reading Bell’s article on community and cyberculture which presents a very interesting discussion about the term community, both real-life and virtual, and also presents some positive and negative views on online communities. I think this will impact on my virtual ethnography by increasing my reflexive point of view. I will be asking myself whether I think negatively or positively about online communities and I am sure that my ethnography will be quite subjective because of this.

It was interesting to read through Rheingold’s very positive account of an online community. The fact that he is an active member of this community will certainly influence his point of view.

The comments on the discussion board don’t appear in the lifestream so there is less evidence of particpation. It was nice to use the discussion board for a change, but I’m also looking forward to the virtual artefacts appearing from next week and the discussion that will take place on the blogs.

Rheingold, H (2000) Introduction to The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. London: MIT Press. [web site]

At the beginning of this week I was still looking at the visual artefacts made by other students and commenting on these.

I then turned to Block 2, looking at virtual communities and ethnographies. The lifestream reflects the readings I have done on this and shows some of the searches I have undertaken on the Internet to find a community which I could research. The two examples of virtual ethnographies I have read so far were interesting to read. Personally I like investigating interactions and making meaning out of these, though (as I stated in one of the posts) this makes me feel quite voyeuristic. I think the ethical aspect is definitely one worth considering, particularly the ethnography on “Happy Land” left me feeling somewhat uncomfortable. It was also good to get back to the discussion board to see what other people are thinking of doing their virtual ethnography on.

Chan, A (2008) The Dynamics of Motherhood Performance: Hong Kong’s Middle Class Working Mothers On- and Off-Line. Sociological Research Online. 13(4). [web site]