Silvana's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

“Ir is important to note that in this third step Giorgi begins to use
one of the most important concepts of Husserl’s phenomenology, the
imaginative variation. “The intent of the method is to arrive at the
general category by going through the concrete expressions and not
by abstraction or formalization, which are selective according to the
criteria accepted” (Giorgi, 1985, p. 17). By using the imaginative
variation, the researcher begins to both follow the concrete experience
of the co-researcher and reflect about the different possibilities of the
meaning of herlhis experiences. He tries to reach the essential and
unchangeable meaning of the co-researcher’ s experience at the same
time that she/he discards those meanings that are not essential for the
co-researcher in her/his concrete experience and situation. p. 5f3” - Alberto De Castro, Introduction to Giorgi’s Existential Phenomenological Researc...

“It could be sa.idthat the meaning units do not really exist in the
text or protocol as such, with which Giorgi would agree. The
discrimination of each meaning unit depends on the relationship
between the researcher and the protocol, which, in turn, means that
the perspective of the researcher has to do with the division of the
meaning units. However, we should also clarify that the researcher is
not going to give an explanation to these meaning units at this point;
she/he is only going to divide the description into smaller and more
manageable units or blocks with which she/he can do a more detailed
analysis. It is very important to note that while the researcher is dividing
the protocol j.nto meaning units, she/he always has to bear in mind
the sense of the whole of the co-researcher’s description in order not
to impose a rneaning that is not expressed by the co-researcher. pp. 51-52” - Alberto De Cast...

“Once the researcher has read the pratocol and has a sense of the
whole, she/he has to divide the pratocol or description into what
Giorgi calls Meaning Units. The task in this step is to discriminate the
different units or blocks that express a self-contained meaning
(polkinghorne, 1989, p. 53). It is apprapriate to bear in mind that we
have to look at a.nd understand these units or blocks in terms of the
whole meaning, as Sokolowski emphasizes. Giorgi comments that the
units are divided by looking at the different key terms, aspects, attitudes
or values that the co-researcher expresses in the description. In this
way, the researcher has to be aware of the changes in topics and
meanings in the description. When the whole text or description is
divided into meaning units, the researcher can analyze each of them
easily because shelhe has now manageable units.” - Alberto De Castro, Introduction to Giorgi’s...

“I would like to darify the context in which Giorgi is based. He situates himself within the perspective of the French Existential Phenomenological philosopher
Merleau Ponty, who thinks that phenomenology is best understood
in the light of the phenomenological method, which he says has four
principal characteristics: it is descriptive, it uses the reduction, it
searches for essences, and it is focused on the intentionality. Giorgi
takes these characteristics as the basis of his work and method (Giorgi.
1985, pp. 42 - 43).” - Alberto De Castro, Introduction to Giorgi’s Existential Phenomenological Research Method, Psicología desde el Caribe. Universidad del Norte. No. 11: 45-56, 2003

“Sokolowski (2000, pp. 23 - 24) comments that a whole can be called
a concretum, which is something that exists as a specific individual,
which, in tum, can also be experienced and appraached in a concrete
way. He also says that there are parts that he calls moments, which
cannot exist and present themselves apart from the whole to which
they belong, even though he says that we could think about these
parts as independent fram their contexto However, we should keep in
mind that when we think in this way, these parts are not concrete
things, but only abstract objects. These parts that are being thought of
abstracdy can be called abstractum.” -  Alberto De Castro, Introduction to Giorgi’s Existential Phenomenological Research Method, Psicología desde el Caribe. Universidad del Norte. No. 11: 45-56, 2003

“As Von Eckartsberg
comments (1998, P.21) about it:
We go first fram unarticulated living (experiaction) te a protocol or
account. We create a “life-text” that renders the experiaction in narrative
language, as swry. This process generates our data. Secand, we move
from the protocal te explication and interpretation. Finally, we engage
in the process of the communication of findings.” -  Alberto De Castro, Introduction to Giorgi’s Existential Phenomenological Research Method, Psicología desde el Caribe. Universidad del Norte. No. 11: 45-56, 2003

Sarah Payne’s introductory video on her virtual ethnography on a quilting community

“One of the consequences of this process of reconfiguration has been the disintegration of his analytical writing style, which we should not forget has been cultivated for some years. Geoff’s found this loosening of the style quite liberating - being able to put what he wants and what he feels in his journal entries. p. 199” - Angus, T., Cook, I., Evans, J. et al. (2001) A Manifesto for Cyborg Technology? International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, vol. 10, No. 2 pp.195-201

“Getting students to write journals using a situated knowledge epistemology and a cyborg ontology…allow[s]…connections to be seen, made, thought through and expressed, messing with those logics and boundaries in the process. But it cannot divide the world neatly into the right or wrong, the good or bad, the ethical or unethical, the responsible or irresponsible. Things are not black and white here….But (how) might it work if no clear answers can come from it? p.199” - Angus, T., Cook, I., Evans, J. et al. (2001) A Manifesto for Cyborg Technology? International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, vol. 10, No. 2 pp.195-201

“Border pedagogy…assumes that students come into class with important social, cultural, economic knowledge and concerns and works to critique and build upont that situated knowledge. pp. 198-199” - Angus, T., Cook, I., Evans, J. et al. (2001) A Manifesto for Cyborg Technology? International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, vol. 10, No. 2 pp.195-201

“[Haraway] argues that a ‘responsible’ and more ‘objective’ scientific knowledge of the world is one which is grounded, embodied and locatable in a ‘knowing self (which) is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to joining with another, to see together without claiming to be another’ (p.119) p. 198” - Angus, T., Cook, I., Evans, J. et al. (2001) A Manifesto for Cyborg Technology? International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, vol. 10, No. 2 pp.195-201

“…we orchestrate the course: prepare detailed handouts, make sure the right readings are easily available, orchestrate class discussions, arrange extra course office hours for smaller discussions; assess the journals according to clearly set out criteria; and decentre ourselves as much as possible. p. 197” - Angus, T., Cook, I., Evans, J. et al. (2001) A Manifesto for Cyborg Technology? International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, vol. 10, No. 2 pp.195-201

“…an uncanny digital pedagogy concerned with reflecting on, and playing with, the hauntological notion of temporal disjuncture would deliberately spread itself across multiple orientations toward the synchronous and the asynchronous - working at one point within the securely asynchronous discussion board, at another with the chaotic textual tapestry of the real-time text chat, and at another with technologies like Twitter, the synchrocity of which lies somewhere between the two. p. 7” - Bayne, Sian (Forthcoming March 2010) Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies, special edition London Review of Education

“On registering on a social site, we are invariably invited - almost as a first step - to ‘upload an image’, to duplicate ourselves visually in a piece of identity work which invites artifice and play as much as ‘authenticity’ or its semblance. In that our images and profiles - and, in more visual environments, our avatars - represent a ‘re-embodiment’ within the terms of the digital, we scatter our ‘bodies’ across the web where they gain a kind of independence as nodes for commentary, connection and appropriation by others into new networks and new configurations. These versions of ourselves become representative of uncanny ‘embodied absence’ as much as ‘disembodied presence’ (Hook 2005); our actual and immediate activity on the network at any given time is less important than the presence of our representation, our ‘ghost’. p. 6” - Bayne, Sian (Forthcoming March 2010) Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies, spec...

“What would a digital pedagogy look like which engaged purposefully with this fluid, haunted space?…Such an approach would turn away from digital environments which attempt to contain the pedagogical encounter within an online replication of the bounded classroom…An uncanny digital pedagogy concerned with the ghostliness of place would take a confident stance toward its own ‘otherness’, using the multiple, disaggregated and public nodes of the read-write web as places to conduct its business. p. 5” - Bayne, Sian (Forthcoming March 2010) Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies, special edition London Review of Education

“In the context of a ‘distance’ education, the many digital signs and traces of the university - its virtual learning environments - come to take over the ‘full function’ of the institution they symbolise. The university’s online manifestations become the university. As a ‘place [it] doesn’t exist’. p. 5” - Bayne, Sian (Forthcoming March 2010) Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies, special edition London Review of Education

“Institutional ‘capital’, once signified by bricks, mortar and physical proximity with an academic community, becomes diffused by the network as ‘place’ and ‘learning community’ lose their material anchor and become virtual and imagined. p. 4” - Bayne, Sian (Forthcoming March 2010) Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies, special edition London Review of Education

“The university’s digital futures promises more…spectrality, as technologically-mediated communication makes distant engagement with its pedagogies increasingly viable, and increasingly desirable. The university becomes ‘emptied’ of the bodies of its students and teachers who engage with each other - in new and often greater intimacy - through multiple media of the screen and in a fluctuating orientation to ‘being there’.p. 4” - Bayne, Sian (Forthcoming March 2010) Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies, special edition London Review of Education

“For in working online as teachers and learners, we are working in ‘destabilized’ classrooms, engaging in spaces and practices which are disquieting, disorienting, strange, and anxiety-inducing, uncanny…this disquiet is located in a new relation to the real and to the sense of oneself: ‘this is a new kind of experience, a new metaphor, a new world in which to re/create ourselves, re/imagine our relationships to others, and re/evaluate the real and the unreal’ (Boon and Sinclair 2009:103” - Bayne, Sian (Forthcoming March 2010) Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies, special edition London Review of Education

“…the learner as a cyborg – an argument which…remind us that cyberspace affects not only pedagogy per se but the identity of learners too and with that changes in perceptions of what learning is. P. 4” - Usher, Robin (1998) Lost and Found: ‘cyberspace’ and the (dis)location of teaching, learning and research, Research, teaching and learning: making connections in the education of adults, SCUTREA, Exeter.

• "…our literary tradition is to metaphorize and abstract the physiological functions of the body..."
• "A central paradox in cyborg theory is that consciousness or soul is understood to be indelibly..."
• "We might instead acknowledge or explore the use of the cyborg not as actual disengagement of self..."
• "The evidence of such statistics renders contradictory, if not absurd, the extravagantly metaphorical..."
• "A significant portion of our cyborg literature betrays not only its non-post-human faith in mythic..."
• "The construct of the disembodied subject is a literary trope – a product of language and image – as..."
• "Ironically, in our popular and academic literature the cyborg figure of the ‘post-God era’ functions..."
• "…the essential paradox of the cybercultural discourse that proclaims disembodiment or bodily..."

• "…even if it isn’t an ‘actor’ in the traditional sense, the cyborg is a situated figure of..."
• "Cyborgs are both a writerly device and a molecular- or smaller-scale biotechnical idiom. Just as the..."
• "Cyborg analysis suggests the body as a lived site and surface, it suggests processes of regeneration..."
• "If only because the cyborg is a constructed simulation of a body, we face the choice of either..."
• "If there is one flaw in the cyborg analysis, it is the need for a figure whose scale and spatiality..."
• "Privatization and militarization continue to be watchwords for the cyborg, but the bloating of the..."
• "Both flâneur and cyborg allow us to write counter-histories of the future in which hybrids and..."
• "The flexibilization of women in the labour force continues, but with a much clearer feminization of..."
• "[Newly emerged sites include] the body, televisual media (with its soap operas, features and..."
• "As a site, the body highlights the rise, not just in medicalization and pharmacology but in..."
• "Haraway’s initial stress on women’s consumption work and participation in the informal..."
• "[The web] succeeded the Internet as a publicly used informational commons, despite notable divides..."

“…the cyborg personifies; it makes visible, represents and thereby lets us get at an intangible and overaching ‘informatics of domination…first, the conversion of the world into information, whether survey data, tracking of customer purchases and preferences or genomics’ four letter language of DNA sequences. Second, surveillance via data-mining…Third, recombination of traits at the genetic level to enhance certain qualities…the space and scale of the cyborg is nano, genomic, molecular. pp.211-212” - Shields, R. (2006) Flanerie for Cyborgs, Theory, Culture & Society, vol 23; pp209-220.

• "Cultural beliefs, or more accurately cultural presuppositions, play important roles in determining..."
• "There are, however, more benign forms of the posthuman that can serve as effective counterbalances..."
• "In highly developed and networked societies such as the US, human awareness comprises the tip of a..."
• "…transforming the conditions of life for millions of people, are networked and programmable..."
• "As inhabitants of globally interconnected networks, we are joined in a dynamic co-evolutionary..."
• "What we make and what (we think) we are co-evolve together. p. 164"
• "Increased communication, access to databases around the world, communal knowledge-building through..."
• "Cultural beliefs and practices are part of this co-evolutionary dynamic because they influence what..."
• "I regard the posthuman, like the ‘human’, as a historically specific and contingent term..."
• "…the cyborg no longer offers the same heady brew of resistance and co-option. Quite simply, it..."

• "Those who go online for identity play may soon find themselves hemmed in by the expectation that..."
• "…the disembodiment model sits uncomfortably with broadband technology, allowing for a greater..."
• "…it is true to say that even in extreme cyber fantasies the body still matters in such..."
• "It seems to me that many are a little too quick to affirm an absolute break with humanism, and a..."
• "The ‘digital divide’ does not just involve differential access to technology but also..."
• "…it would be wrong to suggest that it is only now that the material body is becoming fully..."
• "…a complete erasure of bodily markers is just as unachievable online as it is offline. Whether..."
• "The task of posthumanism is to uncover those uncanny moments at which things start to drift, of..."
• "…the “post-” of posthumanism does not (and, moreover, cannot) mark or make an..."
• "The rhetoric of digital disembodiment is manifestly at odds with the increased use of surveillance..."
• "…rather than taking us into entirely new directions, our ‘cyber selves’ (Aas,..."
• "For a medium routinely associated with a state of disembodiment or pure consciousness, it is..."

• "To be human is to be engaged in a very complex system of distributed cognition. And therefore the..."
• "…it is important to point out that identity play is difficult to maintain, even in settings..."

“…what we see with digital media is not so much the death of the author, as the distribution of the author function in new ways. …f you create a digital work, you are collaborating with the software your are using to create that work. And the people who created the software, in a sense, are your remote co-collaborators. And you are also collaborating with the computer hardware. And all of these have constraints and possibilities that you can explore.” - Hayles, N.K. (2009) Interview with Stacey Cochran, YouTube - 28 March 2009

• "…it can be a shock to remember that for information to exist, it mus always be instantiated in..."
• "Technical artifacts help to make an information theoretic view a part of everyday life. [e.g. ATMs,..."
• "Autopoiesis: Its central premise - that systems are informationally closed - radically alters the..."
• "Conceptual fields evolve similarly to material culture, in part because concept and artifact engage..."
• "Virtuality is the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information..."
• "[Claude] Shannon’s theory [1948] defines information as a probability function with no..."
• "In the history of cybernetics…[ideas] were fabricated in a pattern of overlapping replication..."
• "Reflexivity is the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a..."
• "[Skeuomorphs] call into a play a psychodynamic that finds the new more acceptable when it recalls..."
• "A skeumorph is a design feature that is no longer functional in itself but that refers back to a..."
• "…periods are recognizable as such largely because constellations [of ideas] possess…[a]..."
• "It is no accident that the condition of virtuality is most pervasive and advanced where the centers..."
• "My strategy is to complicate the leap from embodied reality to abstract information by pointing to..."
• "By turning the technological determinism of bodiless information, the cyborg, and the posthuman into..."

• "The posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a..."
• "4…and most important,…,the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be..."
• "1: …posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that..."
• "Story 2: …how the cyborg was created as a technological artifact and cultural icon in the..."
• "Although the “posthuman” differs in its articulations, a common theme is the union of..."
• "Story 3: …the unfolding story of how a historically specific construction called the human is..."
• "Story 1:…centers on how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized..."
• "2: …posthuman view considers consciousness…as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary..."
• "3:…posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so..."
• "…the posthuman’s collective heterogenous quality implies a distributed cognition located..."

• "The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. p.44"
• "The dichotomies between mind and body, human and animal, organism and machine, public and private,..."
• "The home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itself - all can be dispersed and interfaced in..."
• "The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes,..."
• "The actual situation of women is their integration/exploitation into a world system of production/..."