The end – as Sian and Jen’s lovely found Flickr image reminds us – is indeed near and it’s time to do those end-of-week summaries I never got round to doing during the course proper. Gulp, that’s my social life gone until Xmas.

Here’s my end-of week summary for this week (week 11?) which is going to be a reflection on the course technologies used or its particular hybrid digital environment.

A few colleagues have commented on how Sian’s paper on digital uncanny pedagogy informs the design of this course (e.g. learning activities, technologies used etc.). However, my take is that it feels much more like an exemplification of Scott Leslie’s idea of “loosely coupled teaching”. Leslie uses this term to designate the assemblage of a range of third-party apps to facilitate the business of learning and teaching. This differs from the idea of a PLE insofar as the provision of the toolset used remains the responsibility of the course team and not the individual student.

The course has been a really imaginative exemplification of loosely-coupled teaching: enabling access to resources, activity briefs, announcements as well as aggregating student content in the form of blog posts, blog comments and tweets.

It reinforced for me the need for a course to have a ‘hub’ – a single space to check in on the  ideas, texts and links that have been exchanged or the conversations or arguments that have taken place. Just as one might argue that every room needs a focal point – usually the hearth or fireplace (see this modernist example) – every course (online or f-2-f) needs a hub. I don’t imagine for a moment that enabling this was easy to – although from a student perspective it was made to look so. In short then, as Clara would say, kudos to Sian and Jen for creating such a great hub (and its noisy, social hubbub).

Strangely enough, in the context of an ed tech blogosphere still chatting about the VLE being dead or, worse still, among the ‘undead’, the experience almost validated the need for VLEs which generally provide a similar hub-like user experience. Sian and Jen though showed that it a VLE could be bypassed and, more interestingly, that alternative tools (e.g. WordPress blog) could make a better job of aggregating diverse content from numerous sources.

A pretty ‘canny’ (take that whichever way you like although it will help if you’ve lived in Scotland or the north east) digital pedagogy of you ask me.

References

Leslie, S. (2007). Your favourite “Loosely Coupled Teaching” example?. Edtechpost: Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating. Retreved 4 December 2009, from http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/10/29/best-loosely-coupled-teaching-examples/

J’aime les nuages … les nuages qui passent … là-bas … là-bas … les merveilleux nuages!
C. Baudelaire: L’étranger

Bill posted about a cool site that creates a word cloud (’word clouds’ and ‘tag clouds’ are different beasts) for your tweets.

I have no idea what to make of mine, based on 100 tweets over three months:

I think I can see evidence that I’m using it for acknowledgement (”thanks”), comment (”nice”) and maybe dialogue too (”sian” appears in my word cloud as an addressee). A couple of bits of technology appear – Prezi and WebCT – but both as objects of frustration (”feeling” and “cross” are in the cloud). Twitter as spleen-venting tool perhaps?

I can see some of the topics that have caught my interest – “field” “community”, “picture”, “visual” etc.. There’s no “uncanny” or “ghosts”.

There are no elephants in my cloud which is a shame as is my hunch that, good as it is, it hasn’t really caught how I’ve been engaging in the course via Twitter.

I was intrigued by a reference to Boon and Sinclair (2009) in Sian’s paper so went off and read it.

This bit caught my eye:

Facebook user profiles are obvious constructs: there is truth in them, but invariably artifice as well. Thus, to some, these digital selves become fractured, confused reflections of a person, never wholly unreal, but never wholly real either—a seeming half truth. Disquiet arises then in having to ask the questions how much truth exists in a profile and how much trust should one attribute to the individual behind it? Even real world friendships can be confused or diminished by interactions with a digital self which seems to contradict the known real world self. The intermingling warp and weft of the real and the unreal can lead some to increased feelings of distrust and isolation.

I passed it on to a younger academic colleague interested in Facebook who disagreed totally. Here’s what she wrote:

I have never felt more connected to my friends all over than i have with facebook, skype, etc. I think in fact, instead of fracturing, these sites bring parts of your life crashing together, your boss, cousins, friends, colleagues all come together. In some senses, for me, it brings my fractured “real self” with different groups of friends or people all together in one space.

Maybe interesting in connection with our lifestream experiments …
References

Boon, S., & Sinclair, C. (2009). A world I don’t inhabit: disquiet and identity in Second Life and Facebook. Educational Media International. 46(2): 99-110.

A really exciting and thought-provoking paper from Sian. A manifesto for this course? Maybe, though I’d say  it was more philosophical blueprint (the spectre of Sian’s argument haunting the dispersed spaces of our own reflections?).

In the Skype chat session Sian asked if we thought it was over-theorised. For me I think it was. Sorry Sian – I did enjoy it though and would welcome your replies.

The appropriation of Freud’s theory of das Unheimliche – I’ve always liked the French translation:  l’inquiétante étrangété, worrying strangeness – was interesting and raised a smile (the spectre of Sian’s literary theory past?)

However, I wondered how different Sian’s use of it was from many educationalists’ conviction that  learning is about coming out of – or being taken out of – one’s comfort zones?

In other words, what’s gained or added to in terms of complexity in employing a psychoanalytical concept instead of other terms? For example, I might use terms like displacement, deracination or disorientation to describe some of the effects in which learning – in its most far-reaching form (what Sian calls “a
 genuine
 higher
 education”) – has on students. Alternatively, I might describe learning as unsettling sedimented modes of thought, behaviour, belief, speech and, ultimately, identity.

I like Land and Meyer on liminality and troublesome knowledge and Barnett on awkward spaces and strangeness. For me though, they pointed to other related, albeit with their own differences, conceptualisations of pedagogy as making strange or unfamiliar. Uncanny pedagogy then doesn’t have a monopoly on the idea of intellectual uncertainty as core to learning.

Similarly, I wasn’t sure where the ‘haunting’ metaphor took us; isn’t it just a way of saying that in HE, like the little boy in The Sixth Sense, we “hear dead people”, our texts, spaces and practices informed by the past (call it ‘tradition’ if you like). I also wondered just how unfamiliar the temporal disjunctions of technology-mediated communication now is to say, those in the 18-25 age group. I suspect they deal with the “chaotic
 textual
 tapestry” of synchronous, asynchronous and inbetween-chronous (Twitter but also possibly Google Wave) rather comfortably.

Just before reading Sian’s article, I read a piece in The Observer called Inside Broken Britain. The author, Robert Yates, a working-class boy made good from Liverpool, is writing about Liverpool’s economic problems – as viewed through this home neighbourhood of Walton and a highly personal perspective. Towards the  end of the article, he describes a visit to a school, Alsop, which had recently received massive investment and a conversation with its head, Mr Jamieson:

Should not a school like Alsop – the largest in Liverpool, one of our great cities – be producing a host of regular candidates for Oxbridge, say? There hadn’t been any in recent years, said Mr Jamieson. On a previous trip, as we walked around the school, we came to a board listing recent school leavers who had gone on to university – mostly local, I noted, quite a few to the “new” universities.
The handful of us who went to university when I was at the school would never have dreamed of staying at home, I said; leaving was part of the adventure. Economic reasons, Jamieson figured, a reluctance to incur too much debt – you had a grant, he reminded me.

At first Yates’ argument irritated me: Liverpool’s bright working-class kids were going to the local ex-poly instead of aiming (’higher’) for Oxbridge. However, the key issue for Yates was the staying at home and not leaving home bit; this was the key part of the HE “adventure”, leaving friends and family, becoming a fish out of water, having to reinvent oneself. I like the word ‘adventure’ here and its suggestion of engagement with the strange and unfamilar, taking risks, exposing oneself to danger. And, of course, coming out of the adventure changed. Generations of people – the first ever in their families – are going to university and yet are not experiencing the same intensity of upheaval – necessary upheaval – as a part of their higher education learning experience that is occasioned by the leaving home part of ‘going to uni’.

I wonder, to end on an optimistic and more consensual note, if digital spaces can compensate in some way for this loss (and I think of it as a real loss)?

References

Bayne, S. (forthcoming, March 2010). Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies. London Review of Education. [revised version uploaded 10 November 09]

Given this course’s boundary-busting characteristics, I’m going to carry on in a similar mode and discuss my assessment 2 ideas in public. Sian – hope that’s ok?

I think I’m only really going to finish the course if I produce something that connected to my current professional practice. For IDEL a couple of years back I did something completely unconnected (We have never been digital) and suffered for it in spite of finding the experience intellectually stimulating.

So, I think I’d like to write something on a small Twitter project I’m leading. It’s got a some funding from LearnHigher and I’m going to need to produce an evaluation in March or April 2010. It would be nice to do some work on it now.

How would it fit the themes of the module?

Well, I think discourse on Twitter exemplifies the utopian and dystopian narratives that characterise the reception of new technologies. It is, alternatively, ‘perfect for the always on/always on you tech-savvy digital native’ as well as  ‘another sign of HE going to hell in a hand cart as yet another faddish tool is used to further degrade students’ writing skills, attention spans and cognitive abilities’.

My  project is also interested in the ways  Twitter might support the development of  learning communities through:

• the public posting of questions, comments and reflections (quasi-lifestream)
• resource sharing
• dialogue (student-to-student, student-to-lecturer)

One of my projects is working well and there could be some interesting analysis of the interactions taking place. However, another is a complete failure and I want to interview a sample of the 90 + students to explore why Twitter doesn’t work for them. Privately the module leader and I are actually quite cross with them (why don’t they get it – they’re doing media audience studies for chrissakes!) but publicly we’re interested in understanding the dissonance between staff and student conceptualisations of Twitter.

Finally, part of me is interested in exploring the use of Twitter on this course as well; there were some interesting comments on Twitter’s lack of suitability to dialogue (140 character limit but also disrupted turn adjacency issues).

All comments gratefully received.

I printed Haraway off to read later but couldn’t resist a quick peek. Got hooked though and had to blog.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I really loved Haraway’s Cyborg  Manifesto. Why haven’t I read it before? Actually, I know why – I thought it was about cyborgs; but, as Haraway explains, her “cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities” (37). That sounds much more exciting.  So, thanks Sian and Jen for the steer.

The Cyborg  Manifesto evokes memories of obvious earlier political manifestos (Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto an obvious reference point as too is Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto). However, for me it has other echoes too – for example of Hélène Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa in its mix of lyricism, fantasy, polemic and provocation. Oh, and its unashamedly utopian stance (it’s a text about liberation).

Strangely, Haraway acknowledges the influence of the ‘New French Feminisms’ – “French feminists … know how to write the body; how to weave eroticism, cosmology, and politics from imagery if embodiment, and especially for Wittig, from imagery of fragmentation and reconstitution of bodies” (52) – but doesn’t name Cixous.

It’s really hard to summarise such a dense and complex text. I hesitate to decribe it as a ‘feminist’ manifesto as it’s more an ‘oppositional consciousness’ manifesto, an argument for the development of permanently shifting affinities no longer based on the perception of shared class, race or gender ‘identities’ . Haraway rejects wholeness, essentialism, stability of identity – her cyborgs are “wary of holism, but needy for connection” (36). What we might think of as being the foundation stones of our identity – as woman or working-class -  are historical impositions:

Gender, race or class consciousness is an acheivement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism. (38)

Liberation can’t be acheived unless we move beyond such fixed notions of identity. Haraway argues that “[t]here are grounds for hope in the emerging bases for new kinds of unity across race, gender and class” (51).

Although Sian claims it’s a good text to help one think beyond binaries, it’s the boundary metaphor that struck more most. Haraway is arguing for permanent boundary transgressions. For example, she breaks from the Cartesian separation of man from the animal world (Descartes, like the Bible, argued man had dominion over animals) and articulates sympathy for the animal rights movement (”not irrational denials of human uniqueness … a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture” (36)).

I found myself drawn to the section on the ‘homework economy’ outside the ‘home’ (46-9) and its claims of a New Industrial Revolution creating a “new worldwide working class”:

Work is being redefined as both literally female and feminized, whether performed by men or women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workeds than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited working day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place and reducible to sex. (46)

Although The Cyborg  Manifesto is a Reagan-Thatcher era text – I enjoyed the reference to the “so unnatural Greenham women” (37) – it feels very relevant to today (rising unemployment, growth of super rich, casualised labour, G8 protests, Climate Camp etc.). The emphasis on new forms of political action based on affinity had a resonance for me too – just think of the different kinds of people who protested against GM foods a few years back.

Gotta go. Great stuff though; need to read it again as I skimmed bits (e.g. skirmish with Katherine MacKinnon).

I’ve just read Shields and, I have to admit, it’s got me quite excited about reading Haraway (who I’ve been putting off for reasons I’ve explained earlier).

http://altosdecibeis.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/
musica-para-o-prazer-nao-para-a-tortura/

I’m not sure what significantly new line Shields is articulating but it looks like a good introduction to Haraway and a clear explanation of the cyborg as “literary device” for exploring identity, power etc. in ways not dissimilar to the earlier literary antecedents (e.g. the flâneur).

Here’s Shields on this:

The inky cyborg is a hybrid subject of history offered as part of a new political myth. It is an immanent critique of the ‘constructed’ nature of a unitary womens’ identity, which was intended to subvert the foundational myths of socialist feminism, whose homogeneous prescriptions limited the political relevance and analytical purchase of academic feminism. Even though avowedly feminine, Haraway’s cyborg takes us beyond heteronormative notions of gender: she is a hybrid, trans-being without clear origins, fidelities or identity. (Shields 2006: 209)

Just as the flâneur can be seen to be a 19th-century literary device who sought the truth of the flux of public space, so the cyborg is a science fiction literary device that encapsulates truths of genetic space. (Shields 2006: 210)

Tales of the cyborg are less a matter of actual, concrete mechanical or even virtual humans. They are more a matter of stories, political mythologies and a form of writing that is concerned with ‘seizing the tools to mark the world’ and ‘recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control’ (1990: 175). The textual preoccupations that bracket the claims concerning the social relations of technologies in the ‘Manifesto’ are notable in that they are a language politics that speaks against colonization, hetero-normative identification and origin myths. ‘A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity . . . it takes irony for granted’ (1990: 180). (Shields 2006: 211)

In terms of taking Haraway a bit further, I thought Shields was really good on exemplifying some of the trends she identifies. I liked this line in particular which struck me as interesting in the context of recent government legislation on drugs, prostitution and, of course, the continued ‘war on terror’ (I prefer Borat’s “war of terror” as the more accurate description):

Terms such as ‘Empire’ and ‘militarization’ poorly capture the internal focus of the surveillant state on both bodies and biological processes (growing incarceration, extra-legal eavesdropping, regulation of substances). (Shields 2006: 214)

This afternoon, I’m gonna print it off, find a comfy chair in Starbucks (I’m thinking Haraway might disapprove of such chains?) and have a read. Will blog again later …

References

Shields, R. (2006). Flânerie for Cyborgs. Theory Culture Society, 23(7-8): 209-220.

Not sure where I’m going with this post. I’m going to start by copying some text from Hayles in which she defines the posthuman:

First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prothesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other protheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that is can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism an biological organism, robot teleology and human goals. (1999: 2-3)

I’m not sure we’re on the same wavelength; I feel I need an example. Hayles unhelpfully mentions the ’six-million-dollar man’, apparently a “paradigmatic citizen of the posthuman regime” (1999: 4) and Robocop (whaaaaat …?).Real-life examples would be nice … .

I don’t feel such a definition – see earlier post – is sufficiently different to earlier critiques of the ‘liberal humanist subject’ or justifies any use of the term posthuman. Posthumanist yes, posthuman, no.

References

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

Perversely, I started my reading with Allison Muri’s ‘Of Shit and the Soul’ (2003). I’m a sucker for a good title; I have a friend who wrote an article on WW1 French and German women’s writing called ‘Beyond the canon’. Brilliant title (don’t remember much of the contents of the paper though).

Anyway, I thought it was fantastic dismantling of discourses around disembodiment or corporeal irrelevance. Muri concludes that “extravagantly metaphorical claims about the disembodied post-human condition are offered as original contributions to academic discourse when in fact they reinforce the familiar old stereotypes of the baseness of the body distinct from, and opposed to, the elevation of mind or spirit (2003: 89-90).

So, such discourses rework centuries old beliefs about our vile bodies; the posthuman does, indeed, always ring twice (have I sort of justified my blog post title ?).

However, skim reading some of the other articles – e.g. Hayles – I think some theorists’ conceptualisation of the posthuman is less about disembodiment and more about a critique of the so-called ‘liberal humanist subject’ and its defining characteristics (e.g. rationality, free will, autonomy, consciousness as the seat of an identity or selfhood which is stable). This looks to me like the familiar poststructuralist and postmodernist critique of the ‘liberal humanist subject’. At the moment I can’t see any clear blue water between posthumanists and  postmodernists.

Anyone any thoughts?

References

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. London: 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).

Muri, A. (2003). Of Shit and the Soul: Tropes of Cybernetic Disembodiment in Contemporary Culture. Body & Society, 9(3): 73-92

Apologies to all for my neglected lifestream which these last two weeks has been more stagnant pond. I got caught up in tsunami of new projects and deadlines (lots of liquid metaphors here). Anyway, I’m no longer drowning (or indeed Google Waving) but have a hour or so to catch up on some reading and write a post or two.

I must admit I’ve felt a bit hesitant about engaging with this bit of the module as the notion of the ‘posthuman’ (my spellchecker keeps converting to ‘postman’) turns me off a little. Everyday, as I check my junk folder for real mail amongst the spam (dolphins caught in tuna nets?) I delete messages advertising products that cure hair loss, weight gain, wrinkles and sexual dysfunction (the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of Ageing). The digital, then, is constantly reminding me of this oh too solid flesh.

Here’s a picture (every blog post needs a pic) of my youngest son a moment after birth taken on my iPhone. It’s a combination of the ‘clean’ digital (the shinyness of All Things Apple) and the ‘messy’ corporeal (shit, blood, vernix etc.). I love this picture though for the squashed-face placidity of my minute-old, water-born son:

My next post will be about the set readings …