Gough asks an important question about posthuman pedagogy and  gives an example of Mayakovsky’s Cyberantics as narrative and textual strategy which might help us in the rhizomantically becoming-cyborg configuration. The chosen audience for the story were kids because of their ‘sense of wonder and curiosity’ which transcends limitations posed by too often dichotomous academic structures.

At the same time, I came across Dave Cormier’s blog with a series of posts tagged ‘Rhizome’. Dave has been pondering on rhizomatic learning for some time now. In one of his posts, he writes a compelling letter to his 5-year-old son, explaining what rhizomatic learning is. Through a moving story involving a bunch of theropods and other ancient creatures, Dave points out how the learning can be stifled if the lines of flights are cut off before they form. If there is no black and white (Angus et al, 2001), why ask questions about ‘right’ and ‘false’ dinosaurs? Instead, following Dave’s advice, it would be better to ask ‘How would I feel if a piece of silicon was naturally part of me? What if my best friend was a robot? How would my life differ?’ Such questions propel the conversation and as Dave says ‘the stories will never end’.

This is the penultimate week of the course. Time to reflect on my Lifestream and choosea topic for the final assignment.  There are also a few loose ends that need to be tied before wrapping up my Lifestream.  There are still a few responses I need to make to comments made by colleagues. AndI never did respond to points Jeremy raised in his comments to my blog on “Is scholarly blogging an oxymoron?”  and it’s been pricking my conscience.  One question in particular, “So do you see the blog as a direct challenge to the scholarly publishing?” made me stop and think. I reflected on my views;  thought more about multimodality, the advantages and disadvantages of academic blogging, and re-read Kress and Thomas. Still I didn’t get round to replying.  Work commitments,  keeping up with the course reading and other tasks took their toll so I still didn’t get round to replying.  But I’d find myself at odd moments re-thinking my views.  I actually considered whether or not this would be a good topic for final assignment                                                   .

The focus this week has been on the Posthuman Pedagogy task. I struggled finding a suitable idea for this task. I had a look at those submitted by students from previous years.  Interestingly, I saw that someone had presented their task on “Learning to swim” so I checked with Jeremy whether I could do mine on learning a new language.  When I came across an article about iPad games for cats, I had to tweet it to Austin (his theme was ‘think like a robot (octopus, skynet)’.  As there are still tweets flying about cyborgs I tweeted about a bike that will change gear when the rider ‘thinks‘ the command. Also saved the video to YouTube. Vimeo isn’t working so it will have to be deleted.

Spent time reading and responding to the posts by my colleagues.  Comments I make to colleagues’ posts are not showing up in my Lifestream.  I did mention this in a previous post.  I have no idea how to resolve this so just hope I don’t get penalised for it.   In trying to get ideas for the final assessment I had a look through my blogs and trawled through the 2009 and 2010 assessments trying to get ideas for my final assessment but no luck so far.