• 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!

First, after the frenetic ten weeks of an intense course, it brought a perfect closure, tying up all the dangling loose ends and allowing one to distance oneself from the experience by encouraging to take ‘time off’ in order to reflect on the ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ of e-learning (and learning in general), digital literacies and presence. For me, the texts had a particularly soothing effect on how I perceive my participation in the course and in online spaces. As documented here on the blog, I have focused solely on my individual learning process, without trying much to engage with others, which I had very mixed feelings about, ranging from anxiety and guilt through occasional indifference to enjoyment I derived from being undistracted and independent . Although I’ve perhaps taken my solitary habits too far, the texts have helped me understand that one does not always have to be in the centre of things, that sometimes it’s good to take a step aside, that solitude is justifiable and beneficial as it might provide time for reflection, deep thinking and thus unleash creativity. I think, without sounding too pompous, I can confirm that within the limits of my mental faculties, I have experienced little epiphanies and sparks of ‘divine inspiration’ while engaging with the course content, leading to a deeper understanding of the discussed phenomena. I’m especially thankful for the fact that I could learn about threshold concepts and liminal spaces, something that Land (2006) links to in his paper about dromology. I’ve got a feeling that the elements of that massive jigsaw puzzle I faced back in January are starting to fall into places – it’s rewarding to discover their interrelatedness, a telling sign of deeper thinking (?) With all respect to my colleagues and tutors as I am sure that the discussion forums are teeming with great ideas and links to excellent resources, sometimes I think I haven’t lost much. I might have less but sometimes ‘less’ is better. Maybe by sticking to my own comfort zone, I have prevented myself from getting bogged down in making sense of frenetic buzziness of discussion forums and let myself hear my own voice speaking!

At the same time, I have noticed a slowly emerging trend on the ELT blogs – a couple of renowned practitioners wrote about the increasing dilution of high-context relationships in their professional lives  due to the profusion of cybercommunications with a number of ‘followers’ and other ‘friends’ on social networking sites and expressed a strong longing for fewer but deeper interactions. One ‘guru’ has questioned the value of personal social networks, taking it so seriously that he decided to commit twittercide and deactivated his account. Although it is generally considered a great loss among ELT community members, I can understand his reasons, even more now when I have read about the need for silence and sanctuary. Strangely enough, he is the same person I mentioned in the previous posting about the uncanny education (toward the end in the post scriptum) on the occasion of discussing two approaches in m-learning. The apps approach could be likened to the routinised ‘ratio’ thinking stipulated by (Levi 2007b). There is nothing bad about such quizzes and alike because they let language learners familiarise themselves with vocabulary and grammar chunks probably quite effectively but other approaches are needed too which will allow them to use the language creatively and expressively. And as you have aptly summarised it, Clara, we should be  speakers of thoughts, not mimics of noise!

What really struck me in Levy’s paper is the origin of the word ‘school’ – it derives from ‘leisure’ (2007b: 247), which itself has a very interesting etymology in Greek philosophy! I found these two facts very revealing. And since universities - but I think this applies to other educational institutions too - are regarded as our culture’s think tanks, on the one hand, and ‘descendants of Plato’s academic’, on the other hand, contemplation and reflection should be placed in the foreground (Levy, 2007b:247). Land (2006:6) argues that these could facilitate better integration and thus transformative learning, in the process of which threshold concepts can be acquired, threshold concepts being important gateways providing insights into links between and within theories. The necessary processes of analysis and synthesis often resulting in problem formulation and solution as well as fostering creativity and criticality in more general terms can be instigated and managed in slow motion of liminal spaces more effectively than in ‘concertina-like time compression’. Since life seems to have accelerated rapidly in recent years and so creativity is likely to be obstructed, Levy (2007b: 248) claims that unfortunately education often pursues these societal trends and focuses on preparing ‘efficient multi-taskers in a world of total work’ (247). This can be seen in business-like obsession with outcomes and objectives (CEFR), summative assessment being the driving force of teaching and learning (high-stakes English preparation courses I teach on) and students’ attitudes – interestingly enough two weeks ago in a class of 16 Chinese pre-masters students, to my question why they decided to do a uni course, 5 admitted it should increase their future job prospects, 4 wanted to get a degree (their hope being that a good job would follow), which shows their strategic and business-like thinking. Of course, it can be questioned whether such strategic approaches are a result or a reason for the education to often so oriented towards outcomes. Just to finish the digression on a more positive note, two of my students admitted honestly that they want to do it for the sake of life experience, which is a ray of hope! Land (2006) introduces an interesting concept of ‘virtual stacking’ in which ‘every vacant spot is filled’, debilitating our higher thinking skills of spotting intra- and interdisciplinary relations. Our knowledge becomes fragmented into bitesizes of often meaningless noise. Digesting so cooked ‘knowledge’ presents a challenge in terms of time. Suffering from its permanent shortage, we fall victim to Eriksen’s temporal principle which says that within unchanged time limits, attention span decreases as the amount of information grows. A vicious circle is thus created. Slowing down to contemplate paradoxically seems to be a solution for businesses, universities, organisations and individuals (Levi, 2007 and Loy, 2007).

What is alarming about the situation is that digital technologies often get blamed for such a state of affairs. As clarified in my prezi presentation, it’s not the Internet itself. Time compression seems to be strangely pre-programmed in the history of the human kind, particularly the contemporary one. Land (2006:7) points out how digital education often gets limited to stacking (within VLEs?) instead of being used for internal integration. This is probably due to reasons Cousin mentions in her 2005 paper, e.g. the toolbox view of technology. Instead, as Garrison and Anderson (2003:122) suggest, e-learning represents a new ‘learning ecology’, which for has a strong flavour of wetlands from the prezi. These and other smooth spaces might help us reconceptualise teaching and learning by establishing integrative practices (e.g. Landow’s hypertext, Ulmer’s electracy) and contemplative practices whereby individuals might focus ‘within and beyond the human’ (Braman, 2007; see also your comment on the uncanny).

Back to Goffman’s dramaturgical approach – I came across it again in Steve Wheeler’s blog post which refers to Goffman while trying to discuss the issues of personal space and place in the context of online learning/teaching experience.  According to Wheeler, there is a relationship between the self-presentation and how we perceive space and place. In order to perform well in the theatre of life/work and take the stage by storm, we need a well-defined role that suits us, our personality and skills, a script and an array of props. If any of these is missing, we might lose the sense of space which, in turn, might negatively affect our performance. For example, when I go and teach (face-to-face), I am aware of my role (and strangely enough confidence takes over my normal shyness), I’ve got my lesson plan and a stack of worksheets, sometimes an audio or a video, an internet-enabled computer and so on. Sometimes I divert from the prescribed course of action, especially if I see affordances for exploring other topics or if technology doesn’t work but with years of experience such emergencies become part of the role, sudden prop-lessness or script-lessness become part and parcel of the role and if they shake up my sense of space, it is only for a split second. Wheeler stresses the importance of continuity as a prerequisite for the sense of space and place and he claims that even nomads recreate this continuity be means of travelling with familiar objects that help them tame any new place they decide to settle down in. This resonates with me a lot – having been on the go for the last 6 years, I’ve managed to re-establish my sense of space across countries and cities with a handful of faithful objects: my fav music tunes, books, laptop and a camera.

However, how does this translate into learning online? In my previous real-time online sessions (video chat or text chat via Skype, Elluminate or WiZiQ) I was aware of the role (a teacher learning how to use technology), the props (familiar software) and the script (agenda was always provided). The same referred to the discussion forums: all the weekly tasks were clearly spelt out with questions to consider although we were always welcome to raise any other issues too. So, clearly something familiar-looking (in terms of a syllabus and objectives for the whole course and each of the weeks), safe and secure (closed moodle environment), cosy (8 people and a tutor), structured, focused on process but actually outcome oriented – a journey from A to B, from knowing little about using technology in language teaching to facilitating a fully-fledged online class on story-telling or a longer-term project on collaborative report writing. I enjoyed those course and when creating my first online course and the second I replicated those patterns as it is how things are in education, aren’t they? and everybody expects them to be like this, right? (I’m making assertions on purpose)

Now I come to do this course and most things seem to be subverted or somehow stirred or unsettled:

• what is my role? yes, I am a student but fascinating as the content is, I’m often unsure how I am going to use it my professional context; come on, is this all applicable, replicable?
• what are my props? WebCT looks similar to the familiar Moodle but not the same, I find it quite clunky. The blog got deserted and swapped for the wiki at some point for similar reasons.
• what is my script? Apart from the list of readings and some guidance on what to focus on, the students are given pretty much a free hand in raising questions on the forums ... and there are so many people and so many tutors that ... I’m losing my sense of space and place and I escape. There is little structure to lean on and let’s face it I love structures and patterns and getting from A to B – my previous MA dissertation was on generative-transformational grammar and I loved drawing tree structures for sentences and tracing down movements in deep structure! And my doodling is always in form of lines forming multiple squares and rectangles ....

.... but at the same time I like organic forms too, wandering aimlessly, free improvised jazz and impressionist pictures and the dusk when the day is almost finished but not yet, sort of liminal, transitional ...

What I am trying to say is that there is dualism in me. Part of me loves the course for the challenge it presents – the readings raise interesting questions about education, learning and teaching, undermine my own perceptions and beliefs and introduce other ways of seeing, reconfiguring me as a learner and an educator – Cousin (2005:119) says after Davis (1998) and McLuhan (1964) that with technological inventions ‘we partially reconstruct the self and its world, creating new opportunities (and new traps) for thought, perception and social experience.’

Part of me dislikes it, because I feel deprived of my props and scripts and struggle to find my place and space. I also think and am puzzled as to how to implement what I am learning in my context, how to introduce activities that would encourage smooth learning when I have fixed course objectives and assessment (very much all about ticking the boxes and discrete items). The issue of assessment which is inherent in HE also poses some questions. It seems it is not only students that are led to explore the troublesome but also the tutors might experience the same – if liminal spaces are associated with intellectual uncertainty beyond the black and white of right and wrong – the foundations of the assessment have to be reconfigured too and encompass the spectrum of greys between and betwixt (something you Clara referred to in your recent presentation).

tiny pools of murky greyness

merging with splashes of sunny reflections

to separate an instant later

in a constant pulsating movement

Water, as Bayne (2004: 303) clarifies in her description of Deleuze and Guattari’s smooth and striated cultural spaces, represents smoothness per excellence, here, in my context, of course simultaneously striated by the river man-made embankments.

What I like about Bayne’s argumentation is the way she emphasises how the two spaces penetrate each other and emerge from each other (2004: 305) in a process of sometimes peaceful, sometimes conflictual co-existence and co-operation, echoed by Cousin (2005:123) who describes technology and pedagogy as ‘overlapping, complementary, conflictual, dynamic’ in their relationship . Neither of the domains is given primacy, neither of them is better – it’s ‘and ... and ... and’, which leaves room for the surprising and the unexpected (Cousin, 2005:124), rather than ‘either ... or’. Bayne (2004) and Cousin (2005) suggest parity and equity epitomised in collaboration instead of subordination within hierarchical structures. That is the first step towards blurring the boundaries in the papers about the uncanny discussed in earlier posts as well as Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto.

However, the methodologies used in HE seem to be mostly based on the latter paradigms, i.e. ‘centralising practices of teaching, assessment and supervision’ (Cousin, 2005:121), which could explain why the web (that part that is surfed not cruised – Bayne 2004: 304) gets subjected to striation, e.g. illustrated by the use of virtual learning environments (Bayne, 2004:312-313 and Cousin, 2005:120-123). Apart from the problems related to the institutions themselves, smoothness cannot be idealised or romanticised as the panacea for the weaknesses of the current educational system: Cousin (2005) warns us against losing oneself in the promiscuous web and going ultra fanciful post-modern. Bayne also stresses that smooth spaces should not be perceived as a saviour bringing liberation from the constraints of the hierarchy (2004: 304). Nevertheless, she suggests that smoothness is explored more deeply and attempts are made to unleash its potential in HE so that the imbalance between the modernist (hierarchical, structured) and postmodern approaches is redressed.

It is paradoxical how smoothness/rhizome oriented strategies might often end up supporting the structure and hierarchy (an example of blurring the boundaries?) - while discussing the education in cyberspace, the human need or more probably academic practice gains the foreground in which things have to be named, categorised neatly into genealogies and as a result both academics introduce binary dichotomies: Cousin introduces ‘arboreal’ and ‘rhizome’ while Bayne discusses ‘smooth’ and striated’, followed by lists of opposing characteristics. Instead of the table illustrating these oppositions, I have opted for a wordle that successfully blurs them

In her paper, Bayne makes use of different metaphors as after Nunes she believes they ‘function as performative speech acts’ (2004: 304). Inspired by this I would like to point out another thing that could perhaps help advance the necessary blurring is a slight adjustment in the terminology – I’m proposing this very tentatively though, aware of my lack of expertise. When reading the papers about use of digital technologies in higher education what strikes me is the constant use of the word ‘pedagogy’ although university students, especially on post-grad courses, are adults. Of course, the term is most probably used in a broad sense of the study of being a teacher or the process of teaching and besides the term ‘andragogy’ has been critiqued extensively; however, the root of the word pedagogy ‘pais’ meaning ‘child’ has made me think that it could implicitly exacerbate the situation within HE and inhibit the shift that the papers are calling for.

When you think of the child, the situational context that springs to mind is that of a family and the relationship with the parent which, taking the physical, emotional and intellectual aspects, can be traced along the vertical, traditionally expressing a degree of control and dependency, in other words hierarchy which is also typical of the university and the students, as well as the teacher and the student (at least in the modernist understanding). No wonder that when on the educational arena another player turns up, that is digital technologies, it’s straightaway fitted (subordinated) into that structure too! - Cousin describes that in much more detail and with greater eloquence. That could be why virtual learning environments are willingly adopted as they lend themselves to the vertical structure very well – unidirectionality, the hierarchy of users and their privileges (course designer/admin, teacher, student), closedness (you can get in only via special secure gateways), tracking and monitoring facilities, sometimes even the interface itself (for example in moodle, the way the weekly modules can be made visible and how they unfold top-down on the page) – a little digression here which I can’t resist – some time ago I attended two webinars on m-learning and it seems to me that the apps approach could be likened to VLEs as it could be subsumed as dishing out knowledge in form of digestible and discrete packages of knowledge – flashcards, quizzes, etc

I thought, on a very superficial level, that swapping ‘ped’ with ‘andro’ (or using an altogether different term) could affect how education is perceived. The relationship between two adults is more of a partnership so mapping it out would proceed on a horizontal plain. In education terms it could translate into peer-to-peer or even expert-to-expert relationship between the teacher and the – to my delight I have discovered Prof Mayes talking about horizontal learning in his paper Groundhog Day again? And I think as a learner I could say that I have experienced this type of learning here on the course!

Lastly, such a viewpoint could perhaps facilitate understanding that digital technologies are not merely enhancement tools, separated, inert and thus a medium that serves educational purposes but they are a serious and equally important player on the educational arena.

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.

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 ...

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!

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?

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!

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