Summary: Week 3

This week my attention has been split between the the ideas of uncanny and ghostlyness encountered in the Bayne paper, as well as our discussions around digital literacy, visual literacy and new forms of learning.  Pulling these ideas together into one short weekly summary is proving to be quite a challenge, so I have been thinking allot about where the intersections between these concepts lie.  Perhaps it is a question of multiple interpretations, of multiple view points, multiple versions and non formalized learning experiences.

Following our discussions of the “uncanny” I began to think about the online ghosts or echos of dead content which still exist in some form, say perhaps in a wiki version history or a Google cached page (lifestream 09.10.2011 #1).  Such data, when it “lived”, might have been considered absolute and definitive, but through constant editing and revision combined with new insights into old knowledge, it has lost its currency and been replaced or updated.  Yet it exists and in many cases is still accessible, thus offering the interested researcher a unique view into the process of learning and refinement that occurred in a given knowledge domain.

A slightly different interpretation of the uncanny can be seen in the result new literacies produce within our existing structures and modes of learning.  The emergence of new literacy skills such as crowd sourced tagging and folksonomy creation “that is controlled by the community of users, rather than an elite group”, (Merchant, 2007) challenges the traditional structures and hierarchies of knowledge coding and classification within the academy.  Given the possibilities for vague usage or personal interpretations of meaning, such informal metadata can produce very different views into a body of knowledge.  When viewed from one perspective verses another (based on something as simple as changing the tags used as filters), one can see the many potential sets of interpretation that might occur.  This truly is a ghost in the machine, an unintended consequence of the growing complexity of the system.  But this ghost need not terrify us. There is nothing false or incorrect about such views into datasets, indeed one might legitimately claim that these ghosts can compliment one another, offering learners the chance at a richer and more complete understanding of a knowledge domain through a “generative uncanny pedagogy”, (Bayne, 2010).

Comments
  • Grace Elliott says:

    Hi Daniel,

    This is an interesting take on what we’ve covered. It made me go back and read Sian’s paper again.

    I made a connection with your phrase, “echoes of dead content which still exist in some form” and fossils. In both instances long dead but still leaving traces of existence for the researcher interested enough to peel back the multi layers. It can be quite comforting in a way to think that we leave traces of ourselves behind. It’s proof that we existed. Maybe that’s our fear, not machines.

  • Good point; those echoes do represent us at a certain point in time. I remember discovering my first web page on an old floppy disk some years ago. The writing style felt so unfamiliar to me, almost as if it had been written by another person. It make me wonder how I’ll interpret this in years to come :-)