…a 12-week course element of the fully-online University of Edinburgh MSc in E-learning. The course finished in December 2012.

It was designed as an open-access, disaggregated learning environment which pulled together content, readings, tweets, blog postings and other social media in an attempt to explore what is most interesting not only about theories of digital culture, but also about the forms and practices of contemporary e-learning.

The site will stay up indefinitely, as will the 2010 and 2009 instances. Access to students’ blogs and lifestreams, to all course content, to the visual and ethnographic artefacts created during this course are all available from here (see the right hand column for links). Links to final assignments will appear shortly. Only copyright-protected readings are protected by passwords.

For more information about what we’ve been doing on this course, contact the tutors – Sian Bayne and Jen Ross, School of Education, University of Edinburgh.

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I’m thinking of making a rhizome out of my favourite threads: visuality and posthumanism and what they can/should mean for the academia, all in the form of a video. I thought I could use some of the visual artefacts created on this course (and some of the related comments too) as an illustrative example of how academia might embrace visuality in the posthuman dance.

If you could please tell me if you agree or disagree to me reproducing your visual artefacts and/or comments, either in the comment area here or by emailing me, that would be great! Thanks! 

Other than that, many thanks for the enjoyable learning experience, good luck with the final assignment and the best wishes for the coming holiday.

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Please get in touch with Ania if you’ve any queries about her final projects. Looking forward very much to seeing your final assignments in the new year – and in the meantime a very merry christmas from me, Jen and Jeremy too!

If you could please tell me if you agree or disagree to me reproducing your visual artefacts and/or comments, either in the comment area here or by emailing me, that would be great! Thanks!

Other than that, many thanks for the enjoyable learning experience, good luck with the final assignment and the best wishes for the coming holidays!

Creating a visual artifact was a challenging yet rewarding experience.  It was interesting to have so much feedback on aspects of my artifact that I had not thought of.  Doing a micro-ethnography caused me to question my idea of virtual community, as until that point I had just accepted the terms for their purely literal definitions.  In exploring the topic I forced myself to challenge the definition and came to realize that I don’t quite agree that true communities can exist completely in the virtual.  Finally in writing about a posthuman pedagogy I realized that learning cannot be a standardized static experience.  It must be fluid, adaptable, and transforming to the needs of the learner, or as Edwards (2010) says should be positioned “as a gathering of the human and non-human in responsible experimentation to establish matters of concern.”

One of the main aspects of this course has been this blog and the lifestream.  I had no idea what a lifestream was when I started, and although I understood that it was to be a track of my personal development through the course, it was clear that I didn’t know where it would take me.  When I initially set it up, I added feeds from Twitter, Delicious and Tumblr.  The Delicious feeds never worked for me, even after I deleted and reimported the feeds several times to no avail.  I played with Tumblr for the novelty of it, but I honestly felt that it was just another place to upload information, and I could serve the same purpose through a blog post.  The lifestream was also supposed to pull in my commentary on my classmate’s blog postings, but that aspect of it also is not working.  I liked having the Twitter feed being pulled in, but even then I found I sometimes struggled with what to tweet.  I have learned that I like posting full commentary to a blog more so than random limited length musings.

So what have I learned from the lifestream process?  I learned that I prefer to collect my thoughts and organize them into longer prose rather than provide a disaggregated look into my exploration of the web.  Did I miss the point?  Should I have challenged myself to work more outside of my comfort level?  Has my lack of inclination to post every step in my exploration hindered my learning?  In hindsight I would have shared more for the benefit of my classmates as I found that I gained valuable insights from their postings.  I spent time reading, and contemplating, and then eventually posting my collected thoughts.  The digital record of my learning may have seemed sporadic but I’d like to think that I gained just as much as others on the course, and it has been a truly novel and enjoyable experience.

The artefacts I have collected have been predominantly textual and I have made extensive use of Diigo to capture them. Although I always tag my sources in Diigo I think I could have made my tags more granular and used the descriptions field more effectively to record richer semantic data for each source. I frequently find myself in a dilemma of how much of a source to digest and capture in the moment as opposed to merely flagging up for later.

I have experimented with visual media using Tumblr, mobile uploads to Flickr and YouTube sources. I find the visual an excellent way to stimulate imagination and spark new ideas.

The blog posts in my lifestream have acted as points of synthesis; for ideas, readings and the lifestream artefacts themselves. It seems that these posts are pivotal in turning what might be considered as simply ‘digital hoarding’ into a meaningful learning activity. The self referential nature of the lifestream for EDC is key as it seems to stimulate reflective and integrative thought processes. I have tried to capture how this has been working for me using this diagram.

My lifestream does not show extensive engagement with others on the course however I would argue that this is not an indicator that my learning has been an individual endeavour as the ever present audience shapes how I frame my lifestream activity. I also use my networks to help filter sources, for example when finding an interesting source I check to see if the author has a twitter feed and if they are active, I follow them. From time to time I scan my tweet deck and these ‘thought leaders’ take me to new sources.

Having whetted my appetite with this posthuman pedagogy I inevitably would like the ‘machine’ to do more to support the integrative activity of making sense of many disparate resources. Perhaps it could help me construct a personal concept map based on an analysis of my interests using as data my digital collections, my blog posts and who I network with. The visual understanding environment looks promising as a step in this direction.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I can now see that it fits well with the posthuman theme and in particular with the idea I mentioned in last week’s summary namely that we are teaching our non-human appliances about what it is to be human.

Sixth sense, Pranav Mistry’s user interface research at MIT is fascinating and illustrates how transparency of interface design means that we hardly notice the boundary between the machine and our human selves. Another boundary ambiguous view is portrayed by Makoto Yabuki’s artwork. However the machine is privileged here. The rather Matrix-esk image shows a human cocooned and connected but rather separated from the real world. It is a beautiful and delicate image so much so that we might imagine another, perhaps more beautiful being emerging from the cocoon at a later date.

However it was Andrew Feenberg’s Ten Paradoxes of Technology that really absorbed me this week! I blogged about it in order to capture the key ideas. Overall I was struck by the clarity that Feenberg brings to explaining our relationships with technology. that really absorbed me this week! I blogged about it in order to capture the key ideas. Overall I was struck by the clarity that Feenberg brings to explaining our relationships with technology.

Finally Amber Case adds her approach to researching these relationships by defining the new discipline of cyborg anthropology.

This week my lifestream seems a rather eclectic mix which crosses context boundaries and demonstrates changes in pace of engagement. I began with a mission to get a better feel of the ideas around the cyborg and the posthuman condition. I was interested by Hayles (2006) idea of the cognishere as “distributed cultural cognitions embodied both in people and their technologies”. Searching on cognisphere led me to Alex Reid’s Digital Digs blog. He has a number of posts tagged with Cognishere and I spent a long time browsing and digesting these. His analysis the film Avatar
particularly caught my eye. He skilfully brought out the intertwined relations between the human, the digital and the biological not just in the film story but in the creation of the film and on the act of watching it! This is also a loop back to the Sci Fi examples used to trigger discussions around themes (utopian/dystopian) earlier on in the course.

A single rich source provided me with 50 postings about cyborgs. This again absorbed me for several hours and it was something I returned to on several occasions. To pick one of the many interesting points this series raised.

“It can be said that while we augment & extend our abilities through machines, machines learn more about the world through us.” “These sophisticated marketing and research tools are learning more and more about what it means to be human, and the extended sensorium of the instrumented world is giving them deep insight into the run-time processes of civilization & nature.”

http://www.urbeingrecorded.com/news/2010/09/22/the-cybernetic-self

Later in the week I found myself at a work related conference and restricted to short mobile posts via twitter. Some of these were notes or questions to self, the idea being to refer back to them at a later date. Of particular interest were some of the new technologies introduces by other delegates as I might be able to use them as part of the course. Thus my lifestream crossed from course to my work context and back again.
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Hayles, K. N. (2006) Unfinished work: from Cyborg to Cognisphere. Theory, Culture and Society 23(7-8)

It’s been quite a journey, these past twelve weeks. I’ve been exposed to new ideas, concepts and applications.  I entered into Sian’s ‘uncanny’ space.

When applying for this course and reading the blurb, my first question was, “What is lifestreaming?” I hadn’t encountered it before so I came to it with no preconceived ideas, only with the information offered in the course guide. Likening it to ‘commonplacing‘ was very appealing.  Basically I’d be keeping an online scrapbook, a  record of places I’d visited, text and images I found interesting, giving a taste of my online activity at that moment. A snapshot of my life as an #ededc student.

I was ambivalent when I first began setting up feeds, it was both exciting and daunting. I felt unsure exactly what was required of me and apprehensive that anything I wrote was open to public viewing. Visiting the sites of my colleagues‘ unnerved me.  Theirs looked fantastic, showing creativity and experience, in comparison mine looked dull.  The practical side of organising feeds was problematic and much time was spent tweaking the feeds; or waiting while images were uploaded; or until Twitter became available; or indeed if Internet access became available. However, the content in my lifestream shows progress has been made. I admit to only feeling comfortable with lifestreaming towards the end of the course.

I did ponder on the purpose of the Lifestream. Would keeping a record of my online activities enable me to become a better learner? And if so, in what way?  Edwards (2010) says, “to learn, humans have to gather and experiment.”  An initial glance of my Lifestream shows an eclectic collection. Like a Magpie, I would gather and store anything interesting.  It may have been related to earlier, present, even future course content so it wasn’t always done in a linear way.  The RSS feed set up for the Female Science Professor feed led me to do my ethnography on science bloggers although this wasn‘t part of my thinking at the time. How the collection was used has been a surprising feature of lifestream.

Feedback has been an important part of my learning. Comments from tutors and colleagues have been regular and invaluable in helping my understanding, as have the blogs.  The different interpretations given to our visual artefact task was amazing. The lifestream has been helpful in engaging in, and understanding, the course but I agree with Carol’s view that our lifestreams are only to be made sense of in retrospect.

On reflection, if I had to do this over again how would I do it?  I would make notes about why I selected each piece and my feelings at the time. An injection of  humour to my ‘online presence’. is needed, I don’t recognise much of the ‘real’ me. My entries don’t show how much fun this course has been.    Creating ‘presence’ as a distance learner is difficult.  Ania mentioned that she’d like to see some pics of my location, and Jeremy commented on “how our ‘virtual’ experiences are always permeated by, and enmeshed with, the ‘real’ world around us.” With this in mind I tried to upload pics of my journey to work. The road I take cuts through the desert, with sand dunes as as high as hills.

Other vehicles are few so it feels like it’s just me, sand dunes, date farms and camels. Remote. Solitary.  Isolated. Not unlike my experience of online learning. Access problems just add to my ghostly presence, “the ontological blurring of being and not-being, presence and absence online.” (Bayne)

Whilst writing this I am exhibiting signs of being posthuman.  I’m listening to iTunes and uploading images; there’s a couple of tabs open on my browser so I can quickly check things out; I am constantly flicking between this document, my Lifestream, and pdf files; and I’m downloading a video. My Mac has become an appendage, it is part of me. Technology is a big part of my life.

Edwards states the need for learning to challenge us and this experience is definitely challenging;  #ededc staff and students have taken the ‘road less travelled’.

References

Bayne, S. (forthcoming, March 2010). Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies. London Review of Education.

Edwards, R. (2010). The end of lifelong learning: A post-human condition? Studies in the Education of Adults, vol 42, no 1, 5-17.

The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost

Daniel interestingly referred to the implications for education of the Lifestream as an everlasting memory. Using the Lifestream to record our online activity has revealed patterns where there might have seemed to be none, but it also functions as a kind of record to refer back to or even an uncanny memory of our activity. It has also been interesting to see how two distinct elements have made up my lifestream; those sites I have bookmarked, meaning that I have controlled when they enter my lifestream; and those which have come from RSS feeds and turn up without my knowledge but often provide timely pieces of information that keep bringing me back to themes of the course. One such this week has been some updates from Inanimate Alice. Called ‘School Reports’, one talked about this digital resource’s growing profile in teaching literacy, digital and otherwise, and in its use as a cross-curricular tool. Given my own role advising Primary Education students, this has kept me up to date with developments and provided a resource that I can pass onto students.

As far as sites that I have bookmarked this week, I have tended to concentrate on anything of relevance to my assignment. I found an interesting article on ‘The Politics of Pedagogy’ (2003) by Beverly M. John. She contends that ‘classroom dynamics, as well as the dynamics in higher education at-large, are a microcosm of the same conditions and factors present in the wider American society’. Although talking about the US, John’s statement reflects my own thinking in looking at politics, education and e-learning. Aside from worries over cuts in HE and rising fees, there is also a continuing worry about the commodification of education, where learning has become something that provides what the state wants rather than the individual.

Today I will be finishing up editing my Lifestream and writing my overall summary; all in all it will reflect how much I’ve enjoyed the process and how valuable it has been in getting me to think about how I access digital information. My Lifestream will keep going, although its course may be redirected, carrying with it new studies and work interests…

The thing that she said struck her was the description of the cyborg, and the thought that it was a new concept to add enhancements to the human body.  She mentioned how it seemed that we are focused on the idea that recent technological advances were allowing us to replace lost or damaged limbs, but that people had in fact been doing that for years (the first recorded use of a prosthesis has been traced back to ancient Egypt).  It seemed to her that the trend recently is not simply to replace functionality, but to hide the disability completely (artificial limbs can now be made to resemble real limbs,with freckles, hair, etc – Cosmesis).

VS

VS

She did not understand therefore the ties between the biological enhancements and the concepts of post-humanism.  Where was the line drawn as to when we became a cyborg?  Was it when we could replace a limb with a functional substitute, or was it when we could do so without anyone else knowing?  But then she asked what was the point of hiding the enhancement / replacement if not for our own vanity, or to fit in to the community standards of what is “normal.” If we are trying to fit in, then can we be considered enlightened, and truly have evolved?

We then began to discuss further my posting on transhuman and the idea of transplanting a head to a new body.  “What would be the point… to extend life,” she asked?  She could understand the idea of replacing parts, but not to replace an entire body.  “At what point would you stop being you?”  She mentioned how she had a scar on her shin from an accident she had as a teen.  If she replaced that limb, the scar would be gone, but the memories associated with it would remain (there is also the phantom limb pain, or proprioceptive memory, in which the body remembers the lost limb).  But in telling the story to others, she wouldn’t have a reference to show them, but might say, on my old leg, I had this…  At what point then does the physical reference stop being important and stop being necessary as a reference to who you are?

When we discussed transferring consciousness outside of your body she did not believe that it would truly be you.  Her belief is that you are the sum or your parts; your body, your mind; whatever you consider makes up your consciousness and your self are intrinsically linked.  If it were possible to transfer your “data” to a machine, it would not be you, as it was only raw data… it would be missing too much of the physical aspects that make you unique.

So what then of the post-human and digital culture? As Pickering (2005) suggests, the posthuman perspective is “seeing the human and the nonhuman at once, without trying to strip either away.”  So then can digital culture be examined without human interaction?  Can a modern day human be examined without reference to technology? “Through use of our minds, we change technology, and in return, technology changes our minds.” (wikipedia, nd)  The idea of digital culture then is one in which the technology pervades our lives, is part of it, part of us.  To understand what it means to be post-human then is to be able to see this connection…

“When I think of digital culture, I think of it as a part of ourselves, and an extension of society. What it means to me is a step in mental evolution, and social responsibility. The phrase that explains the idea that technology connects us as humans which I coined is “Human Circuitry” (Pirillo, nd)