Levy in his  introduction to the 2007special issue of Ethics and Information Technology entitled ‘Information, Silence and Sanctuary’ raised a few crucial questions:

• What do we mean by silence?
• Why and to what extent do we need it?
• To what extent do we need a sanctuary in, or from, cyberspace, and how might we achieve this?

 

in the sanctuary

 

mutely cheering itself on

the self performs a striptease

and gets pregnant with ideas

 

In the context of learning, creating materials, writing assignments and alike, silence for me often involves an act of courage as this is the moment when I am left on my own with the blank screen or page of paper and my thoughts (and sometimes there aren’t any) and there is no escape from not-thinking. I switch on my internal ears and eyes to listen and watch attentively for SOMETHING. Sometimes the Something stirs in my mind straight away, sometimes I need to wait. But when it comes, it engages me deeply, draws me in so much that it keeps me awake, seeps into my dreams and keeps simmering at the back of my mind even when going through the motions of the day. It leaves me exhausted but empowered.

****

This blog has provided me with a number of moments like the one above (something I could add to my arguments against Dreyfus' crticism of distance learning). When I first started, I thought it would be a journey from A to B, through a fairly familiar landscape of e-learning. It turned out to be a wander, by no means an aimless wander! I have gone to familiar quarters only to discover unknown cul-de-sacs, sometimes real gems. This makes me want more so I’d like to carry on – Again my life motto proves right perambulation stimulates the imagination (William Boyd)!

I thought of writing a summary at this point of the blog, just minutes before submission, but I’ve given up on this idea. Instead I’d like to share a personal impression. While doing the course, I often struck me how I go in circles around ideas, coming closer, picking up a detail, going away and coming back to understand better. Sometimes it felt I was unknowingly jumping ahead – I migrated to the wiki to discover weeks 8 and 9 were all wiki-based (I wasn’t checking the course schedule in advance), I mentioned Community of Inquiry on my wiki and later we read the whole chapter on it from Garrison's book on e-learning. It baffled me – this penetration of ideas and thoughts, strange hunches. It felt a bit magical at times, uncanny, to use my favourite now word. Another one is rhizome and now time for my little story:

My first posting compared blogging to growing a flower. I didn’t know at that moment that it would be an orchid (which often develops rhizomatic systems and which Deleuze and Guattari refer to in their work 'A Thousand Plateaus' mentioned both in Bayne’s and Cousin’s papers). Now this is a very strange orchid because here on the blog and the wiki I was tending to its tubers and rhizomes but the pretty petals were already formed a year earlier – it’s like growing a plant backwards! Strangely enough, I put a little video together in February 2010 – embedded below – which, could it be an uncanny coincidence?, somehow subsumes my learning here?

The video shows various pictures of orchids from Glasgow Botanic Gardens mashed up with an audio consisting of layers of narration which penetrate each other, merge and diverge, creating a strange-sounding song (uncanny blurring of boundaries, penetration of the striated and the smooth, the dynamic relationship between the techs and pedagogy, all being the landmarks of my e-learning). The narration is in Polish but basically it’s a short fragment from Wikipedia (a mother of all hyper-texts, wikis being another area I saw in a different light) about classification of orchids. And I remember moments of concentrated contemplation and creativity when working on the audio, moments of silence and sanctuary!

 

 

Thank you!