A series of shorter or longer postings dealing with digital natives fallacy can be found in the Prenskyan Polemics section of my IDEL11 wiki.

The postings are organised in the following way:

1. Digitial natives and immigrants - my take on terminology introduced by Marc Prensky 

2. Is there really a divide? - related issues and questions

• What seems to be a pervasive attitude among young people toward innovative technology?
• Does young people's increased use of technology equal their full literacy in using the innovations, including educational and professional settings?
• What is their actual attitude to the use of technology in education?
• Is introducing the terminology of the digital divide and digital natives actually fair to young people?
• Are the digital immigrants really behind in the use of innovative technologies?

3. Summary

4. Clippings

The first reading or rather skimming of Dreyfus' text raised quite a lot of interest in me. I quite liked his scepticism and I thought 'Great, finally there is one person who is not raving about online learning!' and got down to reread the text more carefully, wanting to hear some refreshing arguments which would stir me to think more carefully of why I personally like online learning.

However, each time I reread the text, my head got hotter and I produced this series of responses (click on the image):

This is what Clara wrote in her mid-course feedback:

* Reflection - Does the weblog demonstrate sustained reflection on the course

content and its application for the participant’s professional practice?

You are impressively demonstrating sustained reflection. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed seeing how you relate the course materials and environments to your own learning experiences, practice and areas of interest.

* Regularity -  Are entries into the weblog frequent and substantial enough to

demonstrate such sustained reflection? Are they spread throughout the duration of the course?

Your postings are regular and substantial demonstrating the sustained reflection required for the weblog.

* Knowledge and understanding - Does the weblog demonstrate a good understanding of the technologies and ideas introduced?  Does it show a critical awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of a range of technologies and pedagogical approaches?

You are meeting this criterion very well.  I’m left in no doubt as to the intelligent, thoughtful engagement with the concepts and technologies and am impressed with the way you draw readings together to create your own frame for understanding.  I have enjoyed your exploration of ideas beyond the strict focus on the course materials – since this course is about exploring digital environments in relation to learning, I see these as ‘variations on a theme’ rather than being off-track.  :)  I would encourage you to delve into the course readings a little more, but having seeing where you are going with this in the ‘Prenksyan polemics’ part of your wiki, I have no doubt you are on track for this.

* Communication style and multimodality -  Is the style of the weblog vivid and personal? Are the ideas discussed well-structured and well-argued? Does it make creative use of the weblog form via inclusion of image, media and linkage?

The weblog (and now wiki!) are clearly expressing a vivid and engaging personal style.  The play with creativity and visuality makes for a thought-provoking as well as aesthetically pleasing ‘read’.  I can only continue to encourage you in this vein and look forward to seeing what you will do next!  :)

How I acquired a virtual life in Second Life.

Click on the image below to read on about

• my personal reflections and impressions 
• more academic implications in the areas of selfhood, co-presence and implications for education

A visual evaluation of my wiki migration experiment, its benefits and drawbacks plus a host of questions:

A link to a live map can be found here. There are notes explaining the features of the map (an icon next to the central bubble of the mindmap).

According to the Educause publication, 7 things you should know about personal learning environments, PLEs:

• comprise the tools, communities, and services (not necessarily restricted to the online) that constitute the individual platforms learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals
• and thus illustrate how individuals approach the task of learning
• because of what has been said above, PLSs are learner-centric
• as they put the learner in charge of their own learning processes
• and also promote authentic learning by incorporating expert feedback into learning activities and resource
• PLEs allow students to draw connections from a growing matrix of resources that they select and organise and thus become an extension of the historical model of individual research
• this way they require students to engage in ongoing decision making to maintain, organise and grow their learning environments (this is the stage I am at and which is illustrated by my iGoogle pages)
• but, what is more important, PLEs constitute an environment where ideas are generated, problems queried, and content created and where feedback becomes the combined output of peers, colleagues, and friends as well as experts and critics
• what I have learnt about PLEs and what I consider to be a task for me now is that my PLE should integrate the resources that include the work and voice of others as readily as a my own critical reflection and scholarly work

I hope the image below reflects what my ePLE looks like now and what changes I am planning to introduce to address the fact that I should move from just listening in and reading to actively contributing to the communities, sharing and collaborating. That would be in vein of learning by doing and teaching others in order to maximise your own learning.

You can see a PDF version here. 

 This is a follow up on the earlier discussion initiated by the analysis of the emotions that occur during my participation or lack thereof in the course online spaces and activities. Having compared the comfort zone (blog and my wiki) and a ‘danger’ zone (skype, discussion board, Second Life) – see my comment to entry seven - I have noticed that while entering the latter spaces I am trying to transfer my real life habits, which might prevent me from embracing the potential of the  online diversity. Being a perfectionist that hurts a lot so I suffer greatly, caught in the fit of emotions as illustrated in the past post. It seems I need to change then, at least when it comes down to my online presence (at the moment I am not unhappy about my passivity in face-to-face contexts and besides the course focus is on the online).

The problems I experience while communicating and socialising online resulting from my persistence to be ‘real’ (superreal, one could say) could be likened to the threshold concept. Meyer and Land (2005) stipulate the existence of such ‘gateways’ in certain disciplines and give examples of entropy from physics or depreciation from accounting so I hope I am not violating their theory by trying to link it to something seemingly trivial and describe the experiences as transformative, integrative, irreversible and often troublesome. ‘Threshold’ can be imagined as a point, opening up a space where new understanding of the subject matter and, what is more, oneself might (or might not) be gained. This stage between not knowing and knowing, not understanding and understanding, this ‘the betwixt and between’ (Meyer & Land, 2005: 375-376) has been named by the two researchers a ‘liminal space’ (my attempt to visually grapple with the concept below).

So what might happen when you enter a liminal space?

However, the transition is often problematic and troubling and often involves ‘humbling’. This happens because in the process similarly to the snake skin the old identity gets shed (illustrated somewhat in my ‘autoethnography’ where I stripped myself in front of myself). The process does not happen overnight and there might be a great deal of going back and forth, representing the state of internal struggle and uncertainty, which, however, is pedagogically, intellectually and ontologically fertile. Meyer and Land (2005) claim it might be impossible to achieve the new transformed state. Getting stuck in the liminal space might mean the incapability of overcoming epistemological obstacles but does not exclude ontological ferment. ‘Praxis of stuck places [which] might tolerate discrepancies, repetitions, hesitations, uncertainties, always beginning again’ and refuses ‘the privileging of containment over excess, thought over affect, structure over speed, linear causality over complexity, intention over aggregate capabilities’ (2005:379).

So, a liminal place is actually somewhere ‘nice’ to get stuck in. Meyer and Land describe it as less predictable and fluid. I see it as limitless silkiness and smoothness, yet perpetually pulsating and undulating, provoking things to happen. It’s about the process, the wander during which you reach out and branch out if need be in order to explore the unknown and the uncertain, the affective, the contextual and the local. While doing so, other threshold concepts might emerge, opening up more liminal spaces.

 From http://www.eastonhome.co.uk/Photoshop/flag/silk.jpg

The etymology of the word ‘uncanny’ could be linked to the phrase ‘beyond one’s ken’, where ‘ken’ comes from ‘can’, meaning ‘know how to’. Thus the uncanny is not only creepy and supernatural as it is commonly believed but also or even more so ‘unfamiliar’ (Freud’s ‘unheimliche’ – not homely), thus stretching one’s cognitive comfort zone and even crossing one’s perceptive horizons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny).

Freud’s uncanny takes us to the personal archaeological site where one excavates wanted and unwanted splinters of our past selves, which can have a disruptive effect on our sense of identity. The technological and digital take the uncanny further into the realm of the rhizomatic web where the splinters, ‘remnants of animistic mental activity’ change into ‘bodies scattered online’ (Bayne, 2010:9), traces of our online selves and half-selves (after all, to what extent can we express our full self assuming that the self is not a homogenous whole entity but a multifaceted construct?) imprinted whenever we sign up for a particular online service, in vein with Bayne (2008: 201): ‘If one wants to explore virtuality (I take the word in its broader meaning here, social web in general not only virtual worlds like Second Life), it does not seem appropriate to commit oneself to being one thing’.

So this is me online:

First, how MIT perceives me (any time I attempt to use the application the result is different, which makes me question the reliability of the visualisation but nevertheless I like it and find it strangely comforting to see how I am being reduced to a colourful bar code) can be seen here.

Now my very private take on the notion of online presence, inspired by readings about hauntology and the uncanny (Bayne, 2008 and 2010) can be found here.

These various selves shown in the vids and discussed by Bayne in her papers can of course be overlapping but also discrepant. And it is not only about us operating in different domains, let’s say professional and private (e.g. in the recent SL tutorial you admitted to having several accounts and switching between the avatars depending on the nature of your visit to the inworld; similarly, I’m thinking of having two facebook accounts, one private and another professional) but also within these domains we uncover various facets of our self (‘uncover’ not necessarily being the opposite of ‘conceal’ but rather ‘accentuate’ and ‘emphasise’ as well as ‘embellish’ and ‘distort’ – ‘Online identity constructs contain both truth and artifice, they are fractured, confused reflection of a person, never wholly unreal but never wholly real, a seeming half truth’ (Bayne, 2010: 9). The constant self-multiplication might create a kind of dissonance or ‘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; Bayne, 2010). I’d like to focus on the selfhood here, leaving the rest of ‘ontological stammering’ (Meyer and Land, 2005) as well the consequences of such doubts and crises for education to be dissected in a separate post (Entry 19).

As said earlier, the duplicates of myself get strewn across the online landscape. What is worth considering is that they might prove hard to control or obliterate. You, or rather yous, join a powerful network and, as Bayne (2010: 9) puts it, ‘gain a kind of independence as nodes of commentary, connection and appropriation by others into new networks and new configurations’. For instance, even if you delete your facebook account, parts of your identity might be still living in other users’ accounts. Your online identity is subject to constant fluctuation, fragmentation and dissemination, no matter how persistent or non-persistent your actual presence is. In fact, your absence/inactivity can paradoxically lead to your presence too (Bayne, 2010:9, talks about ‘embodied absence’ ). To illustrate this, recently while googling my name I discovered I am 126436th in the ranking of tweetwasters, a dubious honour (and it unnerved me at first to see how my ‘I’ is meddled with) but to me indicative of how little control we have over our online footprints (or clickprints?). Once I took part in a webinar on online tutoring and in one of the slides, to my total surprise I saw a picture of my desk (the presenter was from the company I had taken a course with earlier), another time on some blog written by a person who doesn’t know me I came across my name, used in association with a particular ELT approach (at the time I was putting together an online workshop on it but I was keeping that knowledge to myself so obviously somebody else must have dropped my name in that context). Even though on these two occasions I wasn’t subjected to any ridicule, I felt a bit of discomfort, possibly because these ‘mes’ although seemingly just mere representations of the real me somehow gained importance of their own. It’s like being face-to-face with your clone, your lookalike, which somehow can replace you, obliterate you, make you redundant,  something the uncanny both in Freud’s and Bayne’s writing is related to. This way coming across our online doppelganger in the least expected moment might disrupt  our sense of being, integrity (in a sense that all these smithereens of id which constitute ‘me’ somehow hang together), wholeness, sovereignty, simultaneously, however, inducing enticing attraction, also raising questions to what extent I am and can be responsible for that ‘other being’ and to what extent I (can/should) associate myself with it, especially in a situation when our identity becomes an object/commodity and as such undergoes mashing-up, repurposing and unfortunately sometimes misuse.

As said in the section ‘SL_Selfhood’ of my wiki, there is something symbiotic about the relationship with the online ‘mes’, especially at the beginning when we need to ‘feed’ the avatar in SL or other online representations, this connection potentially being subverted later. To disclose or not disclose information and which information to disclose is a dilemma we all face when getting re-embodied online. To what extent can I reveal myself and in what ways can and do these glimpses of my soul (used metaphorically) live or even outlive me online? In order to express myself on this blog, I’ve made a couple of videos, e.g. one on liminal spaces, which aim to present my take on the academic issues covered on the course. The take is quite personal and perhaps simplistic (not to mention my amateur attempts at drawing, animation, photo-, video- and sound-processing – I have no pretence to be an expert in this matter and actually the constraints my lack of skills in this respect imposes on me are quite frustrating) – I’ve had to make the vids public to be able to embed them in my blog, a decision that was not easy. Would others, random strangers, who come across my youtube channel show ‘thumbs up’, ridicule or just shrug their shoulders? Yes, the decision to come out and publish something and thus leave a tangible trace has been disquieting but also exhilarating. I am trying to reason with myself in order to suppress the anxiety – there are conduct codes online, that if even the harshest criticism won’t matter because the critic doesn’t know me (actual me), doesn’t have access to the full me, my motives, my intentions so how would their opinion be objective (on the other hand, I am aware of those motives and intentions so I am ‘clean’ in front of myself). Then there is also a simplistic argument that I wouldn’t poke fun at anybody so perhaps I won’t be laughed at either. Perhaps naively, I have a notion of the community as complying with the conventions, giving assistance to members in maintaining their face in the event of a blunder. So maybe you are right, Clara, suggesting that we are trying to bridge the gap between the uncanny and the familiarity by filling it in with our notions of what we are and what the community is (the question however is whether such a gap exists?).

Now, this is yet again my very personal interpretation of the uncanny – my postings are very self-oriented, which I find partly therapeutic (as I have my little epiphanies on the way helping me understand myself better)but partly stifling. Being a bit of pragmatist too, I would like to see how I could apply this in a wider educational context – on to the next posting then!

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?

If online presence involves fragmentation of the body into multiple e-presences (as suggested in the previous post), the relationships get forged between the real life me and my online representations and possibly some of my online personae also link to each other. Such a complex construct starts interacting with other net users/residents who have formed similar identities. I can imagine that the real selves and online selves relate to each other on different levels and in different configurations, the links being of different strength. I would love to be able to present it in 3D but at the moment my drawings Pic 1 and Pic 2 will have to suffice.

This is just two people getting connected online but considering the number of ‘friends’ and ‘acquaintances’ we make online, the network might grow unbelievably huge and  multi-layered. I imagine this as a live construct, dynamic in its movement and change which I am unable to represent visually. However, I could use an example - recently I have seen a fascinating talk given by Deb Roy about the birth of a word. In this talk he shows how through the use of technology and advanced analysis of data researchers have managed to capture how a child learns a language. This is an amazing piece of research in itself but what also captured my attention is the interactive 3D visualisation Roy uses to present the data (8:32 minute). The wordscape  that is built by the dynamic traces left by the child and his caregivers, a knotted bundle of ink trails, social and solo hot spots, in my view, could demonstrate our activity online, the knots being points of exchange between us/our online selves and others/their online selves as we/our online selves wander across the netscape. Roy moves on to describe how the analysis could be applied in the study of media (around 11 minute of the vid) and the interplay between the social and content graphs, another mind-blowing representation of what the networks look like and work. What  this powerful images add to my own very simplistic attempt to pin down the nature of relationships and interactions is the content contribution as it is not only people and their avs we relate to, but the artefacts scattered online!

This is a private rant of a helpless and confused person and also a follow-up on your mention, Clara, of Goffman’s dramaturgical theory of performance and self-presentation when talking about the significant change I would have to undergo to transcend the barriers erected by my getting stuck in my little and cosy sanctuary (discussed in the adobe video chat). In order to explain social interaction, Goffman uses a metaphor of a theatre where the performance is being put up on the front stage. This is where we act. It’s an interactive play though because the audience is being watched by the actor in exactly the same way as he or she is scrutinised by the viewers. In order for the act to be coherent, conventions have to be agreed on and complied with by both the watchers and the actor and in case of a blunder mutual assistance is given to save the face. The willingness to assist, I imagine, is in proportion to the level of intimacy between the performer and the audience. That possibly grows with the degree of success in meeting each other’s needs. The actor sometimes steps back, from the front stage to the more familiar back stage (where other members of the troupe are waiting for their turn) where he or she can take off their mask as they are now within their group. There might be a degree of playing at being here but less than on the front stage. It’s the offstage when the actor is being truly him/herself as this is probably their sanctuary.

Goffman claims that the person’s identity cannot be clearly mapped out and is quite arbitrary in nature; neither is it stable or independent , rather it is constantly moulded and reshaped in the process of interaction. It looks like a change can only be propelled when performing on the front stage, possibly also backstage, that is social spaces. Perhaps but I would say that the time offstage is equally important and this is where the change could be initiated or consolidated. Otherwise there is danger that, as actors, we might fall guilty of being unfaithful to ourselves as we lose ourselves in the pursuit to satisfy others’ needs. Performing all the time might delude us into believing we are acting well when in fact our acting has been squeezed into the ruts of generalisability and standardisation.

So, the big question for me is whether I really need a community to undergo a change and how loose or close the relationship would have to be? You see I’m quite ok on my own, having conversations with myself in the sanctuary of my blog (perhaps having one or two confidantes would do sufficiently, three makes a community, doesn’t it?). But there is so much talk about collaboration and social constructivism, so much buzz and so much ‘wow’-ing, especially now when Web 2.0 has opened up new social spaces, and I am aware of that, have experienced some of that in the past but do I really need others, and so many of them, to reconfigure myself? Increasingly nowadays I want to switch off, step out of that stream of collective consciousness and just be on my own (more about the importance of time off in another post) but ...

So, I’m sitting on that threshold like on the fence and cannot decide because the online theatre is even worse than the real one. And it’s not only because it has intensified the ‘buzziness’ and ‘busyness’ but also because the boundaries between the front stage, back stage and strangely also offstage in an uncanny fashion get blurred and so do our identities. Our self/selfs can get involved in the interaction with the audience (other self/selves), even in parts of the offstage, which would mean almost constantly one of our online selfs preparing a role and mastering a set of given conventions.

Jumping onto the front stage, into the community means drowning in a constant flow of information and deafening twitter – yes, I know, I am being unfair but this is on purpose – on top of that there are pre-agreed conventions, I’ll have to conform to, act according to and also meet others’ needs , prep to do so, all this being prerequisites for the coherence of the group (Goffman), also partake in others’ angsts ... Are communities, all the twitters and facebooks and alike the only way to go? They open up but they stifle too by demanding that you act as they play. Isn’t it better to leap to the other side, and be free to fly or wander and discover ... Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail (Ralph Waldo)? But if I leap to the other side, will I get transformed? Is there enough drive in me to accomplish the change? Do I trust myself enough as a learner and human to go off and break a trail? Or will I just wander aimlessly without direction?

The question remains unanswered* and the show must go on ...

*As noted in the video chat, it’s a bit of everything, a balance of both individual and social learning - a very easy answer but a difficult thing to do if somebody has strong leanings to one side! And in any case you have to jump ...

PS I googled quotes about balance and this is what Uncle Google spat out:

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking (James A. Baldwin).

Quite interesting ...

An assortment of notes with what others said and what I said, albeit in my mind, during the video chat. The topic was information, silence and sanctuary.

It would have been so nice if I had managed to break my silence habit in that chat but I didn't. Should I look at that in terms of failure? Should I look for excuses like potentially malfunctioning microphone (I wasn't sure if it was working properly - there seemed to be a lot of background noise) - I could have asked for assistance, I could have used the text chat. It's tiring to think of what I could have done and equally tiring to promise myself what I will do next time. I felt much calmer though as I could smile and show I was listening, something I wasn't able to convey in the previous real-time sessions. Nevertheless I could not relate to what people were saying about contributing to the discussion boards, connecting with others on a more personal level, or the possibility to lurk in audio chats but not a video chat (ha! I managed that!). I think the issue has somehow exhausted itself. I've probably overanalysed it and not much has come out of it, at least not in practical terms. 

Would I qualify to be described as one of the stories from the dark side of e-learning discussed in the first week of the module (some of them commented here - what lofty and idealised opinions I had then!)?

Anyway, it was nice seeing people - both tutors and other students and hear their voices. First, I thought that this sort of contact was introduced too late. Perhaps it would have been easier to relate to people seeing them face-to-face instead of being freaked out by the little pencils writing away at a maddening pace in the first skype chat. However, I can see why it has been structured this way. The gradual introduction of identity (from words only via graphics and audio to video: text > text plus visual avie > audio plus visual avie > audio, video, real person) makes perfect sense to me, especially when you think of how the content was introduced in a sort of reverse order from more hectic hectic, group oriented activities like virtual worlds and wikis to calming down, reflecting on the need to pace yourself, the importance of silence, withdrawal. Nice closure!

It was interesting how you averted your eyes and doodled to concentrate better on what was being said, how Rory was gesticulating, shifting in the chair, moving away from the screen and then closer to it, Jacki sitting so straight, Chantelle looking to sides to glance at the papers, or maybe gather her thoughts. I found it interesting how I was switching from one looking mode (looking at me, especially when I was scratching my nose;), looking at another person (which could have looked like I am looking away - but that was a kind of eye contact I was trying to maintain) and looking at the camera so that others could see my eyes - I think Dreyfus is trying to explain this paradox that it's never possible to replicate the eye contact you have face-to-face.