I go online and change into a handful of pixels, digitised letters and graphics, frayed codes of scripting stored in multiple accounts of googles, twitters, facebooks and alike. I go online and interact with others, often people I haven’t met, other professionals, hobbyists, experts, encapsulated similarly in dozens of usernames and passwords. Sometimes I catch myself doubting their existence; just last week I thought the whole IDEL course is a hoax – my tutor turns up at the real-time session as a dragon, my coursemates look like cartoon characters and we examine if in our mind’s eye we see each other as real people glued to computer screens or avies sprawled on comfy cushions round the virtual bonfire (I see the latter although an awareness of people behind the avies lingers at the back of my head). Does that look like a serious post-grad course at a reputable educational institution? This question comes up every so often ... ... also in conversations with others – my partner has just come in and over my shoulder glimpsed the heading from the text I am reading - ‘Fragmented bodies’ (Bayne, 2010: 9). Thoughts challenging my sanity seem to be forming in the recesses of his mind ...
Ghostliness and death (Are my online personae ghosts of myself or is it me who becomes spectralised due to the online multiplication of my identities [*]? Whose karma is to die? Who is to remain immortal? k-punk is talking about ‘fragility of analogue’ and ‘infinite replicability of digital’), animation, automation and insanity (The way my av moves, gently sways to sides or hangs her head when left ‘unattended’; the mechanised loop of the deadly dance with a sword I got trapped into when exploring the Macbeth project in SL [*]; even the little restless pencils in the skype chat which signify somebody is in the process of writing a response or the mad emoticon frenzy in the first chat make me shudder at the thought that my online self is live, animate, independent which seems like a scary prospect ), the double (self looking glass, threatening and enticing at the same time, see the picture of The Uncanny Valley by Graham Caldwell at G Fine Art by vincentgallegos) and lastly the intellectual uncertainty which arises when the real and unreal start penetrating each other, blending, thus erasing the ‘exit’ and ‘entry’ points, making one rhizomate into a complex identity construct residing in a number of temporally and spatially synchronous digital spaces beyond the frail material body with its constraints due to time and location. This might be further complicated when such complex ontological constructs come into interaction on the web (see another photo from the same source as above).
This blurring of the boundaries between familiar and unfamiliar, material and digital, human and automatised is possible due to the fact that the sign, being it an avatar or an online nick, no longer merely represents the user’s selfhood but uncannily becomes the signified, that is the person behind it (Kristeva 1991 in Bayne 2008:202). This ontological shift understandably might lead to ‘a crisis of the natural’, where nature stands for ‘one’s own nature, human nature, the nature of the reality and the world’ (Royle 2003 in Bayne 2008).
This sounds troublesome if not hysterical and insane, potentially creating havoc in any reputable institution: destabilised classrooms full of disoriented students and tutors being a blow to the established order of universities. Bayne (2010:6) states that the issue can be approached in two ways. She briefly mentions the possibility of quickly bridging the gap by neutralising the uncanniness and refers to an example of children embracing a digital text in order to absorb it into the repertoire of familiar learning practices (Carrington 2005 in Bayne 2010:6). However, you wouldn’t try to neutralise something that is positive, important or enriching, would you? To me this seemingly pedagogically sound move looks like trying to make the technology as transparent as possible so that it does not distract from the ‘real’ purpose of learning which is acquisition of a particular skill, literacy in this case; doesn’t it resemble Dreyfus and his acquisition model? It seems like technology is pushed to an subservient position, subordinate, purely instrumental, something that Cousin (2005) talks about at length. It smells a bit of universities introducing technology in form of various virtual platforms but transferring the traditional methods of instruction to normalise the novelty and minimise any related disquietude either on part of the students or professors.
Bayne (2010), however, also comes up with a different proposition, according to which digitisation and virtualisation of learning might be perceived in positive terms, as a learning experience that truly carries transformative and generative potential, at least in certain educational contexts. The destabilisation, not only in terms of time and space but also identity, presence and nature, as mentioned at the beginning, can prove fertile in a sense that the student has to reconstruct themselves in the relation to notions of time and space – ‘distance modes re-position the ‘thereness’ of learners and teachers rendering us in a sense ghost-like, spectres (Bayne, 2010: 7) ‘hovering between presence and absence and making established uncertainties vacillitate (Davis 2005: 376 in Bayne, 2010: 7). As to the related ‘ontological stammering’ (Lather 1998 in Meyer & Land, 2005: 379), the student learns how to deal with anxiety and uncertainty on a very cognitively abstract level, either by resolving the arising conflicts or accepting them, in any case learning to ‘live purposefully with them’ (Bayne, 2008: 203). Such negotiations require that the student (and the teacher too) engages deeply with the concepts, reflecting on the changes their selfhood undergoes alongside and how these transformations might be reflected in academic practice, which is what high-quality and ‘genuine’ education is (‘must be’ in Bayne’s words) about. Since ontological transformation might be an ultimate learning experience as one learner stressed in her weblog – ‘Philosophically, I think finding ourselves or who we really are, is the ultimate learning experience’ (in Bayne, 2008:201) - digital pedagogies could be perceived as a ‘privileged mode [..] in which [..] new dispositions toward teaching and toward knowledge might be explored and delighted in’ (Bayne 2010: 11).
This phantomenological approach would position itself in the direct opposition to Dreyfus’ model of education and his insistence that face-to-face settings are the only ones where learning can flourish. As he dismisses the online as the educationally rich and sound environment, in his view, the online could be at most the second best. In light of Bayne’s understanding, this does not have to be the case, at least in certain context with certain students (and my learning on the IDEL course illustrates that for me very well).
It is also interesting to examine how this approach relate to Gee’s theory of three identities where the projective identity is an interplay between the actual and virtual selfs. The gap has to be bridged so that the learner feels enticed to acquire new skills and knowledge (more can be found here). I think this could be perceived in two ways. If the relationship between the online and actual identities is imagined as ‘linked separation’ with links being loose threads simply mapping one’s online wander where the distinctions between nodes are the prerequisite for learning as sources of anxiety and ferment, Bayne’s approach would challenge Gee’s game-based learning. However, the links being the blurred boundaries between real and unreal and thus instigating ferment, then these ‘no man’s lands’ could be compared to the projective identity. It would be this stage in between, the liminal space from Meyer and Land (2005) where by reflecting on ‘me AS a learner’, ‘me AS a human being’, ‘me AS part of the world’, ‘me AS part of the virtuality’ we learn deeply and undergo transformative and irreversible changes.
POST SCRIPTUM
To finish off, a few loosely related thoughts:
I thought I was a forward-thinking and very pro-technology professional. However, I used to believe that tech is a wonderful TOOL that can be used to enhance learning. Since pedagogy is most important, the tool should be as transparent as possible, flattened, sitting quiet and doing what is supposed to do. I think I have made it clear on a few occasions here and on the wiki (for example here) that pedagogy comes first. Having read the few texts: Bayne (2008 and 2010), Cousin (2005) as well as Meyer and Land (2005), I have understood that this is not the only and certainly not the best way of fostering e-learning and learning in general. Strangely making things simpler doesn’t accelerate learning while complexity could prove more successful in this respect (although the learner might end up learning other things than the course designer has planned). On this course, or rather an anti-course, on several occasions I have experienced a truly empowering feeling I am touching on fundamental issues of what is learning and what is being, things that perhaps do not feature among the course aims but essentially provide deep satisfaction even though I still don’t know who/what I am! I haven’t been to the library once, or a lecture or a seminar, I haven’t even participated in the discussions but I am aware of the shift happening.
Now, how do I translate that into my professional context, what do I do to help my learners undergo similar transformation? How do I open up liminal spaces for them in which they open up as learners and human beings. Are they ready for that? Are they willing to do so?
I’ve attended an online panel discussion recently where a few mobile learning providers were showcasing fancy apps helping learn vocab and grammar, drill pronunciation and check comprehension. It all looked fab but what it boiled down to was stripping down the language and compartmentalising it into digestible bitesizes of language, making it as simple as possible. But is learning the language about acquiring little packages of knowledge or is it rather about expressing oneself, expressing who you are, what you are, where you are coming from, where you’re heading, and other questions starting with ‘why’ and ‘how’? One of the gurus in the field threw in a thought-provoking comment: We're not being transformative, we're being reactive, we react in a trad way to what the responses were varied, including head nodding but also grumbles of disagreement. His comment resonates with me, especially now when I am a learner myself. The question how still arises though ...
For some time now I was thinking of a cross-cultural storytelling project in which students of one nationality recreate a story, a folk tale, a national legend (it would be nice if the story somehow reflected their country realia, national character, beliefs, etc) as a hypertext on a wiki. This is then retold by a group of a different nationality, taking the theme and tweaking it, mashing it up so that it fits a different set of realia (spatially or temporally). That was inspired by Cannongate book series in which writers around the world research a selected myth and retell it. What I hope the project would give the students is increased awareness of their origins as well as another culture and naturally means of creative expression of their own and national identity and nationality. Could that be the first step?
Keywords: digital pedagogies, IDEL11, intellectual uncertainty, ontological shift, uncanny
Comments
I was thinking of putting the post scriptum as a comment (in an attempt to make my post shorter) but gave up on that. The first PS is a record of a change in my thinking spurred by the readings and as such probably deserves to be in the post itself, not a comment.
However, I'd like to add a few thoughts here as a follow-up:
The texts I have read focus on higher education - how about other edus, e.g. further edu? What are the examples of threshold concepts and intellectual uncertainty in those contexts? Can we talk about threshold concepts (which are related so closely to the uncanny) in the context of informal learning too? I'm mentioning this kind of learning cos it is closely related to the notions of edupunk and destructive creativity, something that I found out about ages ago and always found very inspiring. The idea goes back to Ivan Illich, an Austrian philosopher, who sees formal and institutional education as a system of funnels providing very homogenised and standardised schooling, which in Land's and Mayer's terms would mean smoothing out any thresholds inducing uncertainty. Illich instead favoured deschooling which doesn't mean so much abolishing institutions as such (although destabilising trad classrooms by constructing them afresh online and thus removing spatial and temporal constraints as well restucturing relationships between tutors and learners could be symbolically seen as such a move) but introducing more personalised ways and spaces to learn. Wouldn't that mean allowing for threshold concepts to arise freely. I think that threshold concepts can be looked at from a more collective perspective (physics students dealing with the notion of entropy) but also a very personal perspective, in a sense that each individual student might have come across such concepts that are just his or hers. Personal learning environments would be the spaces to mull over such concepts and perhaps come up with a new understanding in the process of creative destruction!
Another theory that comes to my mind when exploring the issue of the uncanny and threshold concepts is the theory of complexity; I'm particularly interested in its use in second language acquisition - some complexity theory linguists believe language development resembles in its characteristics an emergent system. 'Language is not fixed, but is rather a dynamic system. Language evolves and changes ... [it] grows and organises itself from the bottom up in an organic way, as do other complex systems' (Larsen-Freeman, 2006). This process of language growth, like other cognitive processes, is based on the ability to act upon masses of input where patterns are spotted and singled out for analysis. Next they are linked and associated with others, combining into larger units and, eventually, giving rise to the emergence of grammar. The process of spotting the patterns and linking them could be perhaps likened to the transformative process of dealing with threshold concepts while the emergence of the language could signify the emergence of a new identity (language being one of the main mediums to communicate the identity anyway).
The discussion about linkage and Gee put me in mind of string theory (possibly a random connection, and not a theory I fully understand) but as one website explains:
I wondered if this idea of strings as ways of connecting and being, but being differently, might help resolve the idea of projective identity and the uncanny? It ties back to my earlier comment about a shared origin from the self for all we perceive as uncanny. (Then again, it’s quite late at night, so your getting Midnight Brain Clara) :)
On your post-script – perhaps the key thing about learning language is that it helps us learn to think, understand and articulate how we are in a cultural context. Bite-sized chunks remove all context and thus all hope of being. We become not speakers of thoughts, but mimics of noise.
On threshold concepts – I think these exist right back to our first learning experiences. From individuation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individuation) for neonates to the ontological truth of Santa Cause :)
My argument with Illich’ stance is that homogenisation does not equate with no threshold concepts – rather it’s about enculturation into specific ways of thinking and practicing – bring people into a specific ‘cult’ of thinking that creates homogenity. Transformation still occurs. Indeed, becoming a member of any field (e.g. medicine, physics etc) means taking u particular conceptual ways of seeing.
This idea of strings makes sense but feels like an easy way out a bit unless I dig into it to understand it better, see beyond it's 'theory of everything' surface!
Homogenisation might not remove threshold concepts, true!, but by enculturation into specific ways of thinking and practising it might stifle the individual and impose the cult-related behaviour in such a way that transformation occurs only when propelled by others, often the 'elders', that happens especially when novices accepted into the cult are not fully formed yet so I'd rather stick to Illich (sorry, it's the sarcastic me talking here who almost got brainwashed once and besides I can see how I'm getting burnt out in my current job just becuase I have no influence whatsoever on some people's 'very particular conceptual ways of seeing'!)