Summary: Week 10
A quick review of my lifestream will show that this has been somewhat of a disjointed week, due mostly to my inability to settle on a topic for the Posthuman Pedagogy assignment. I began the week confident in my decision that I wanted to focus on the idea of distributed consciousness (lifestream: 22:11.2011 #1, #2, #3 and #4) which first arose in the previous week. However as I dug deeper into this concept, it became clear to me that it would be difficult to single out a concrete learning task, given the fact that we could argue humans have always had a distributed consciousness, i.e. our tools shape our thought process and we have always been posthuman (lifestream: 19.11.2011 #1). I also spent a little time thinking about brain augmentation (lifestream: 21.11.2011 #6) and artificial minds (lifestream: 21.11.2011 #5), before finally settling on the idea of Augmented Reality (AR) as a perfect example (lifestream: 24.11.2011 #5, #6 and #7). AR has really come of age and it’s interesting to see how many popular applications are emerging (lifestream: 25.11.2011 #1). I’ve discovered two other great finds during the week; thanks firstly to a reminder from Jeremy (since I must have failed to follow up on reference to his work in earlier prescribed readings), of Steve Fuller. It’s proven difficult to find much of Fuller’s writing, but I have found some fascinating videos (lifestream: 25.11.11 #2), which have echoed deeply with my own thoughts . And secondly, the mind blowing and borderline psychedelic writing and artwork of Robert Pepperell which has influenced my thoughts on personalised realities in my Posthuman Pedagogy post.