Dear group: I am Judy Davidson. Silvana invited me to your area, and I am in awe of what you have been doing. I am an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell’s Graduate School of Education. I teach qualitative research and related topics…and thanks to a research project I was on several years ago (Hanau Model School Partnership studying the initiation of networked technology in a K-12 cluster of schools), I am also the instructor for a course called “Planning, Technology, and School Improvement”. Silvana and I have been collaborating for several years on projects related to thinking about qualitative research and digital technologies.
I apologize for being so slow to get on board with the invitation to view and think with the class. I could say I was extremely busy, but who isn’t. As you know from her posts, Silvana was here last week and she showed me around her lifestream and the various ways your class is connecting. We talked about both articles (more on that later). But somehow trying to get in without my trusty guide was a mental barrier for me.
I got myself set up with Tweetdeck and I’ve been looking at your tweets as a kind of warm up. This morning I said I’ve got to go in and really drive this thing myself…so here I am. I’ve been meandering around in various spaces related to your work, and I AM IN AWE. I’ve been teaching online for several years (first in Intralearn and now in Blackboard), and after this morning I would definitely describe these as ‘medieval’ compared to what you are doing. The implications of what is going on pedagogically in your online world is staggering. I was amazed by the richness of connections that were developing around the discussion of Haraway and Haynes. I found myself jumping from tweet to blog to youtube and back again. I thought–this is the most incredible textbook I’ve ever encountered. I defy the traditional publishing company to create anything like what I see emerging here. Again, I am in awe, and I am honored to have been asked to participate.
As Silvana mentioned earlier, the Haynes piece came right at the right moment for us, particularly her discussion of ’skeuomorphs’, which was exactly the term we needed for the discussion we were editing. So thank you so much for assigning this reading at this particular moment!
I had actually read the Haraway article (probably about 1994) in about my third year of graduate school as part of a graduate student owned and operated campus-based discussion group on the philosophy of science and technology. I was surprised when I went back to look at it to participate in this discussion what I remembered and didn’t remember about what I had read. I remember her as having feminist leanings, but my overall memory about the article was the cyborg argument vis-a-vis technology…I was really focused on the technology. Now, going back and re-reading it, I thought, “The argument about cyborgs and technology is really instrumental to what she wants to say about feminism and Marxism and what she is trying to say about the dead end they had backed themselves into–why did I miss that before?”
In comments by several others you’ve identified the issues regarding the time within which Haraway was writing. When I read the article the first time, the World Wide Web didn’t exist…Mosaic was released the following year (1995)…from the Univeristy of Illinois where I was a graduate student, so Haraway’s arguments aren’t about an Internet connected world, they really grow out of knowledge of biological cyber research. However, whenever I thought back to Haraway–my mind assumed she was writing about the Internet, and yet when I read it I realize that I was conflating my world and hers. And yet, she was really on target with what was about to emerge.
Again, I am in awe, and I think that the value of the discussion, for me, is not Haraway or Haynes, so much, as the opportunity to see what you have done with them.
It’s raining here in Lowell–hope you’ve got sun wherever you are. Good wishes. Judy
