Neil's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

I put aside the course reading for a couple of days in the hope that wisdom would filter down as if a hyper-presence and, touching me gently on the shoulder, would announce, “This is what you should do.”  So, I picked up my copy of Robert Dessaix’ “Arabesques” and let myself wander through its beauty.  For it is a beautiful book; illustrations, photographs, woodcuts and collages intersperse Dessaix’ narrative and reveries as he looks back on the meaning  of travel and how a self-examined life is the one to be lived.  As I read, I found myself trying to assess its place in the cline of humanist – posthumanist thought. ( I find I do that a lot at the moment.)

In his book, he discusses Andre Gide (indeed, the Frenchman is the inspiration for the book) with appearances by many other renowned writers of the early 20^th and late 19^th centuries including Oscar Wilde.  Wilde is described as being the epitome of modern and much of the book takes a humanist slant on the world.  Although a great deal takes place in North Africa, the dialogue is essentially internal or between the author and his perceptions of the Dead Authors.  He attempts to rationalize (represent?) their motives in doing what they did with their lives and it is intriguing that he is happiest doing so within his own head as the humans he attempts to gather with seem only to confuse or divert.

North Africa is at times a mere tableau setting, at others a catalyst for more thought and examination but, throughout the book, you could not say that we learn much about the thinking of the people situated there and certainly not their way of knowing.  They come and go out of the shadows, rarely saying much.  In fact,  Dessaix passes a remark on Said and acknowledges that his approach to the people of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria perhaps indicates the “Orientalism” deconstructed and critiqued by Said.  But Dessaix counters his own comment by suggesting that the exotic-profiling reviled by Said has already given way, post 2001, to a different profiling of the region and its culture so much so that the charge of exoticism no longer applies (Post Orientalism?)

So what does apply?  The book itself resembles a hypertext essay if it were to be caught in print.  One can imagine clicking on the images or the texts within texts to be taken away to a new location where more would be explained about the myriad names, places and texts referred to (sometimes quite glancingly).  Yet the approach, the concept, is humanist in nature with its representational approach to people and places.  Zaida, his friend, is referenced throughout as the “Berber princess” so we can never quite shake off that she is supposed to behave in a certain way even though she doesn’t.  Religion is broken down into categories that attempt to separate or tease out the meaning from the matter.

Dessaix’ book is beautiful.  Reading it felt like sitting inside his head as articulate thought took form and made sense out of a life of reading, talking, travelling and examining.  But one small snag caught at me; what had the North African Arabs made of not only Dessaix but also Gide et al over the years of European encampment within their culture?  Dessaix is too cultured to fall into the trap of attempting to put words into their mouths let alone thoughts into their heads.  We are left with a non-knowing.

It made me reconsider my final assignment.  Having looked at a teachers’ online group for my ethnography and examined a teaching tool for my posthuman pedagogical task, I wanted to find something to pull it all together; a topic that had some practical resonance with my own situation.  Glimmers of ideas were bounding around my head and bouncing of my cranial walls.  I caught sight of them in the corner of my eye and almost understood them when I was paying attention to something else.  Then I read a paper on teaching Humanities in a Gulf Arab context and it occurred to me that this is what I could look at.  Not teaching Humanities per se but exploring how a posthuman pedagogy could inform online course design for my students.  At the outset, I believe that this boundary between humanist and posthuman is porous and, having taught for over 20 years, I’m robustly skeptical of the latest fashions that are going to revolutionise teaching and learning and all the bits that happen in between.  So, this is going to be as much a personal challenge as it is a “get it done” assignment.  In that sense, by posting this blog entry, I’m attempting to bring myself within the posthuman ontology; I don’t want to represent this as a topic but rather explore the shapes of the thing; matters of concern over matters of fact.

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I have struggled a bit with this one, so I have decided to show something that I originally thought was “posthuman” when I first saw it demonstrated but I know think is actually the opposite!

Background

Back in the early 1990s before I even had an email address, I was teaching English in Poland.  My friend, Sara, taught me an activity to help students with vocabulary learning.  On pieces of paper the size of your palm, you wrote the word that you were having problems remembering.  On the reverse side, you wrote the definition and an example sentence.  Then you put the pieces of paper, no more than 10, in your pocket and, during the day, you brought them out when you a few free minutes and tested yourself.  If you got the word right, you would transfer the piece of paper to a different pocket until, finally, all the pieces of paper were in the “known” pocket and you could create a new batch of cards.

Present Day

Anki is a system based on the premise of spaced repetition ie you create learning cards and these decks are set to go off like alarm clocks so that you are tested on your knowledge at regular intervals based on research into the human capacity for recall.

You can download your decks to your phone, tablet, laptop and so on have your decks with you at all times.  You can add details to your cards, use images, add audio and customise them to your individual requirements.

We are being encouraged to use these, so I paid for the iPhone version (all other versions, including Android and desk top are free) and now I have access to my learning cards wherever I go.

Posthuman Pedagogy

I thought they were posthuman because of the use of technology and the apparent ubiquitous  nature of the cards.  They seemed to have taken a simple idea from pre-digital times and updated it in a way that made use of the technology and which integrated human and non-human elements.  In the original idea, I had to remember to take my cards with me and I had to prompt myself to use them.  In the digital version, I could set it up so that the cards would prompt me, keep records of my progress (including time taken to answer) and present the cards in pristine form each and every time.

After reading Edwards, I felt that these were not posthuman pedagogical techniques at all.  The cards were highly representational and were used to “own the language”.  The sharing facility is highly complex to use and doesn’t allow for much “gathering”.  As Barad, quoted in Edwards says: “Representationalism takes the notion of separation as foundational.”  And the disjunct domains of WORDS and THINGS is emblematic of that.  The dilemma is how to LINK this to KNOWLEDGE.  In language, the idiolect is a key determinant of personality and personalisation of the language.  But language cannot be acquired without context.  Matter and Meaning are context.  If they weren’t, all we’d have to do is read a dictionary to learn how to speak another tongue.

So, is is posthuman or not?

You have to create an account to get access to site plus the sharing decks facility is not working properly.  So I’ve added a pdf file with some screen shots to give an idea of what’s going on.

Neil Posthuman Pedagogy

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Looking for a time machine: astrolabes in Medieval Jewish society

This intrigued me as further evidence of Edwards’ ‘gathering” and the non-separation of matter and meaning.  The documents themselves are entangled with the human world they enact with. (Clumsy sentence!)  Perhaps Latour’s “quasi objects”.

Barad as quoted in Edwards:

“Making knowledge is not simply about making facts but about making worlds or making specific worldly configurations”  and goes on ” not making ex nihilo or out of language, belief or ideas but materially engaging as part of the world in giving it specific material form.”

 

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A sentence from Edwards leapt out at me and I wanted to see if I could explore an inarticulate idea I’ve long held but could never find a way to fully express.  In my way, this is an attempt at some responsible experimentation. Edwards was discussing the entanglement of the human and the non-human “as without the non-human, humans would neither exist nor be able to act as part of the world.” (Edwards, 2010, p7)  It brought into focus an idea I’d often had but always stumbled over articulating.

When I first moved to the Arabian Gulf, I was astounded at how such large cities could exist in what appeared to be a hostile environment of heat, dust, salt and scouring winds.  Many others have commented on the sci-fi film appearance of Gulf cities and the sight of Riyadh rising out of its desert plateau never failed to make me catch my breath; how did it survive there?

One minute it's desert, then suddenly it becomes a city

Water is pumped across the desert, for about 450 kms, from the desalination plants on the Gulf coast.  The air is chilled and it is possible to live life without ever leaving a thermostatically controlled environment for more than a few minutes; just long enough to move from your car to the lift or from the supermarket to your car.  Cars rule.  Air conditioning rules.  Water wealth, as commented on by Jonathan Raban in “Arabia Through the Looking Glass”, rules. 

During the 2nd Gulf War, we were warned to store water as one hit to The Pipe (you never needed to ask which pipe was being spoken about), and the city would dry up and out and away.  Embassies filled their pools with fresh water, I filled my cupboards with drums of the stuff.  It brought home the nature of life in these environments and how far we, as humans, have moved into the apparently hostile and made it our home.  The older generations would talk nostalgically of life Before Air Conditioning yet few wanted to return to wind towers and mud walls. 

Living in a desert city is an ontological experience.  So many aspects of life are conceptual e.g. chilled air, potable sea water but the meaning is difficult to siphon off from the matter.  To understand the importance of air conditioning, it cannot be simply represented as chilled air.  Air conditioning makes life possible.  Similarly with desalinated water; you cannot simply say it is water with the salt removed.  Am I making sense?

(I can’t find any images to represent what air conditioning and ample water supply mean.)

Here in the UAE, there is an abandoned village called Al Jazeerah Al Hamra.   To walk around the village is to sense something of Edwards’ take on “gathering things together and experimenting.”  To see an abandoned village, with shutters at the windows and paint on cracking mud walls, is to invite all manner of explanation.  I suppose in a representational way, explanations would be sought as to the origin of the story.  But “origins are myths” and, as Edwards makes clear, “place contraints on experimentation’. (Ewards, 2010, p8.) 

My photos from the village uploaded to flickr (beware: I’m not a photographer!)

The village is a popular subject for newspaper stories and everyone they interview who used to live there gives a slightly different version of the reason why they left.  “I claim little original or seek the origins to that which I write.  I gather words.”  To that I’d add images.  For images evoke words plus emotions and I suspect that an approach to learning that involves so much entanglement cannot escape the powerful impetus of emotion.  To learn why the people of Al Jazeerah Al Hamra left would require a co-existence of matter and meaning; air-conditioning, water supply and strong walls not represented by chilled air, pipes and concrete.  “The knowing human subject is decentred by a concern for ways of enacting within the material world.”  (Ewards, 2010, p9).  The Gulf villages and cities decentre the human subject.  The buildings, their functions, their facilities interact or fail to interact with their environment in ways which the human subject still does not fully comprehend.  The builders of Burj Khalifa in Dubai fully admitted the risks they were taking and how their creation required the development of new technology as the building took shape and grew.  But remove the non-human and what would still function in a landscape where a sandstorm can strip a car of paint down to the bare metal in a matter of hours?

Sand storm moving in from the desert and moving through Riyadh

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This week has really been about trying to come to terms with the concepts of PostHuman and, to a lesser extent, Cyborg.  The latter seems more easily grasped in and I’ve found current events stories online very useful in clarifying what the cyborg is.  For example, the creation of cyborg yeast and cyborg insects.  For me, it’s the more obviously “sci-fi” element but it was also the more understandable: matter and meaning went together in a way that enhanced knowing.

Cyborg Yeast

The main issue lay with PostHuman.  Things that helped were changing the meanings I’d previously given to the name.  I stopped thinking of it as post = after in the sense of a linear development and saw it more as post = after as in “we’re finished with that”.  Edwards’ article on Lifelong Learning was crucial reading in helping me put the pieces together.

Not so much post as plus - a little bit extra

As others on the course have noted, the human element of posthuman is still the same in terms of the motivators and drivers of human endeavour.  But the notions that Edwards postulates of matters of concern, gathering and the avoidance of separation of meaning from matter started to make sense (on the 3rd and subsequent reading).  “Entanglement of human and non-human in the enactment of the world” (Edwards, 2010) suggested a more pragmatic approach to knowing and hence learning especially when put into context with Freud’s “education is an impossible profession” statement.

So I went looking online for examples that I could make sense of.  It wasn’t as easy as finding my Cyborgs.  Then I spotted the argument now raging between Pankaj Mishra and Niall Ferguson in the London Review of Books over Mishra’s review of Ferguson’s latest work; Civilisation: the West and the Rest.  Without going into the details, the issue lies over a concept or rather a number of concepts: imperialism, colonialism, racism being chief.  Ferguson is known for his stance that all empires were not bad all of the time.  Mishra is an eminent author and critic from India and rejects that notion.

So is this a gathering?  What do these concepts represent?  What is the difference between colonialism, imperialism, globalism, nationalism and so on?  Can the meaning be separated from the matter?  As Edwards puts forward, central to the PostHuman condition are conditionality, fallibility, experimentation and responsibility.  Adding richness and depth is his reference to Biesta’s work on Emancipatory Ignorance: trust without ground, transcendental violence, responsibility without knowledge.  There seemed to be enough of this happening in the Mishra/Ferguson tussle to justify some element of posthumanism.  Without a doubt, neither side is infallible and both are experimenting with knowing as they push against historical tides.  Both are risk takers as evidenced by their contentious work (Mishra on Kashmir, for example, or Ferguson on the British Empire) and this recent clash denotes transcendental violence on a massive scale with challenge, confrontation, the role of difference (accusations of racism, counter allegations of academic sloppiness) and otherness.

Niall Ferguson

What hooked me into this as a posthuman gathering was the idea that these writers (as educators) had unlimited responsibility for the “emergence of the world”.  In other words, as they become entangled with both the matter and the meaning of their knowing subject, through a technical forum, the ripples from their gathering will inform and engage others.  This is not the representation of fact but a grappling, an engaging with matters of concern and their high voltage entanglement has arisen from experimentation.  (Not so long ago, no historian would have dared suggest that the European Empires were anything but bad, for example).  What remains to be seen is if it qualifies as “responsible”.

Matters of Concern

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As Carol observed in her blog, after the ethnography I felt like I could take some time to reflect on all that had taken place and the work that had been done. I worked hard on the ethnography because I loved the process and felt that I had achieved something. I also wanted to do it again as I could see where it could be better. This was especially so after seeing some of the brilliant work posted by others!

Isolation. Weeks 8 & 9 have highlighted the isolation of being an online learner. I attended a panel discussion last week on the topic of Online Learning in the UAE and this was a recurring theme. Though I fought the inclination to agree, I realised that it is true. Posthuman and Cyborg are big concepts and the readings take a lot of time to digest and understand but we have no sync time together. Wallwisher just isn’t doing it for me as it’s too much like sticking a PostIt on a wall and walking away. Twitter helps (I say this as someone who hated using Twitter in IDEL!) but the sole consolation has been reading other blogs and postings. Up till now, I’ve shied away from doing that too much and tend to wait until after a block is over before “visiting”. I don’t want to be overly influenced and I don’t want to feel I’ve walked away with others’ ideas.

Ivory Tower? Splendid isolation?

But, every now and again one needs a howf; a place to go where you’ll bump into people you know and be able to talk over the pressing events of the day.

A shelter or meeting place

Week 8 was a local holiday here as we celebrated Eid Al Adha. This made me realise also how non-posthuman we are. There are no “e-holidays” and even in the real world, there are very few occasions, if any, when every country celebrates the same holiday at the same time. Even Christmas is a moveable feast and, when I lived in Saudi Arabia, was totally forbidden. So, no matter how much we may invest in an online presence, our reality is affected by such things as real life holidays! For example, this course follows a semester determined by Western climate and religion. If I’d gone with an Australian university, I’d be on a completely different timescale and a different one again if “located” in India. So, I was on holiday but the course was not. When the course goes on holiday, I won’t. It’s interesting to note how this has an impact on my relationship with my online world. I had the choice of spending time in the desert but with drastically limited internet access or spending time in the city in all its broadband, 3G facilitated glory. I chose the former, enjoying the chance to mull over ideas and read up on the topics. But time goes and I returned to a denuded LifeStream and the realisation that there is not much time to mull things over and no sync session to look forward to.

Distribution of sweets to children to celebrate Eid.

So, my LifeStream this week represents the results of plunder as I’ve raided the Tweets for ideas and links. I also owe a lot to my course colleagues for their thoughts and words as they have helped me more than anything else to get to grips with these new concepts.

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Over the last 2 weeks I have been wrestling with 2 threshold concepts; Posthuman and Cyborg. Until I get a handle on at least one of these, I can not move forward in my learning. For this posting, I am going to concentrate on posthuman.

My initial issue is that I need to understand what is meant by “human” before I can really accommodate the notion of “posthuman”. The aspect I’ve struggled with most is the idea that posthuman means the use of tools. I am of the firm belief that the use of tools is an integral part of being human.

The situation seemed to clarify itself for me with an incident that happened over the weekend. A friend recently moved home to a more remote part of the Emirates and I helped him shift. We discovered that not only 3G but also basic phone connection was sporadic and weak. He is not much into cooking and wanted to keep his life simple so he bought a single hot plate. His purchasing decision was based on how it looked: sleek, black, glass, minimal touch functions. When trying to make coffee in his espresso pot, the hot plate refused to work. However, earlier, he’d been able to heat up some food in a pot. When I arrived, we decided that we could work this out. This is, I believe, a basic human characteristic.

First assumption was that the hot plate was broken. But it worked when the curry pot was put back on. Therefore, it was clearly operational.

Second assumption was that it had something to do with the bottom of the pot as the curry pot was smooth and the espresso pot was ridged.

After a lot of time we’d narrowed it down to either material (all the stainless steel pots worked) or design (all the ridged bottoms did not work).

Finally, the next day, when in an internet accessible zone of the desert, we were able, in 3 minutes, to find out what was really going on. The smooth smart black hot plate was based on induction cooking and would work with ferromagnetic cookware only.

What did this tell me?

First of all that human curiosity and use of tools is inherent and it is a basic human need to solve problems. That almost always involves some kind of tool, even if I haven’t made the tool myself. For example, my friend’s daughter was able to open my iPhone in India with a darning needle as I’d forgotten the little tool that opens the SIM drawer. So, in the hot plate situation, we used all sorts of tools to test the cooking ability of the hot plate. Actually heating food to eat was forgotten in the process.

The solution came when we were able to access the internet (good old Wikipedia) using another tool, the iPhone. I think, for me, that is the moment we became posthuman. Through the use of a tool, a sophisticated one admittedly, we were able to access an unseen yet highly potent body of knowledge that was far greater than our combined knowledge to date. In addition, it was solved in less than 3 minutes.

This set me wondering. Look at the Mayan people. They had a highly sophisticated civilisation. Conventional history makes much of the fact that their weapons were no match for the Spanish. Yet, in the preSpanish context, their weapons were superior and highly successful. Gunpowder, cavalry and steel trounced stone and wood. So, many historians have called the Spanish “more advanced”. And yet Mayan science, knowledge and technology is arguably closer to posthuman than Spanish when we consider the Mayan calendar and their advanced astrological observations. The Spanish came from the context of the Inquisition which had actively sought to destroy science. Posthuman, therefore, cannot be seen as a linear development, which is how I think it’s coming across in the readings and some discussions. The Mayans created an immense body of advanced knowledge that was accessed by successive generations through their writing and architecture. For me, posthuman is when we use a tool eg a system of writing or an iPhone, to access an advanced, accumulative body of knowledge that then assists us in solving a current issue. Is this making sense?

As some of the more recent Tweets have suggested, I think that posthuman is something that we can tap into and have been able to tap into throughout history without ever achieving a full-time, full scale posthuman state. If you could pluck a clerk from an 18th century counting house, you could train him to use our technology (and perhaps avert a monumental financial crisis to boot). There is not, I believe, anything inherently different in our brains at this point in history which makes us posthuman. It is our use of what we have created (or had created for us) that makes our applications of knowledge and our paths to those applications posthuman. It is a part-time state.

I suspect that there’s is some very human hubris involved, too, in this reaching out for an advanced state of evolution. However, a quick look around the globe and we can see that though the technology has changed, the basic motivators of conquest, oppression and parochial xenophobia have not.

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This week has been one immersed in ethnography, both in the making and in the sharing.  I have enjoyed looking at everyone’s work and have got so much out of seeing the results of our readings and our attempts at creating an ethnography.  This has helped bring the LifeStream and the course itself alive for me.  Up until now it has been an intellectual exercise (as well as a constant balancing act between work, study and the miscellany of living) but this week has taken on a shape and a focus that has made digital culture vividly real.

We are on holiday now for a week to celebrate Eid Al Adha, so though I’m not leaving the country, I am travelling up to the North to stay with friends on a date farm.  I’ll have no internet access for much of the time though my readings are all on my iPad.  This will be a new test of how my online presence will be affected by my apparent disappearance.

PS went to see RA.One in which a computer game villain hijacks the “digital rays” which fill the real world and he, yes, crosses over.  Interesting to see what powers he was given in the real world and how again we are still at the stage where the digital world represents a threat.  More on that next week when I become posthuman.

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Preparation

Preparing for this assignment brought back memories of being an undergraduate at Edinburgh in the early 1980s.  I was studying history then and we lived in terror of allowing any hint of subjectivity to creep into our essays and assignments.  It therefore came as a shock when reading for this task to find that not only was subjectivity “allowed” but, in some cases, it was seen as a positive thing.  Smith, as quoted in Gatson and Zweerink, point out that there is “no such thing as a non-participant observer.”  I wanted to explore how far I could allow myself to acknowledge that I was part of the experience.

Selection

I chose a group of which I have been a member for several years.  The group is affiliated to TESOL Arabia and, as such, has a particularly teacher-focused activity.  The special interest group in question, Learner Independence, is the larger of two groups with close links (the other having a third of the membership and focusing on Distance Learning).  I am not an active member of the group in the sense that I do not post on the Discussion Board but I do follow up on many of the links that arrive in the group feed.  Again, as Gatson and Zweerink point out, “multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations.”  I was curious to see how these functioned and how far they took me from the main topic of the group i.e. learner independence.

Personalisation or Subjectivity?

My other aim was to see how I could experience this beyond a clinical exercise (which is how I initially viewed it).  I was struggling with how I was going to present my mini ethnography and was flicking through my notebook when I realised that the pages I am always drawn to are the ones with my mind maps.  Using “Inspiration“, I decided to see if I could create an ethnography in the way that I take notes and also work.  The result is shown below.  This is my subjectivity showing itself; I chose the colors, the headings, the layout and the text in the bubbles.  Of course, there were boundaries placed upon me by the software, but as Kress and others have pointed out, digital text is far more conducive to personal expression than linear conventional presentation.  This was my personal challenge to myself.  I added a deeper personal note with the images of one of my mind maps and part of the notes that I referred to as I worked.  I liked the idea of having my handwriting inscribed within the ethnography presentation.  At first I was frustrated by the shadow my arms and iPhone cast on the paper while I was trying to photograph it (my attempt at including scans didn’t work).  However, I then got caught up in the metaphor of “the ethnographer’s shadow”; literal, in this case.  How much of what I’ve presented represents what the group in question is all about?

More Metaphors

Finally, I wanted to include some nod to Gergen as quoted in Wesch’s Digital Ethnography: “the postmodern being is a restless nomad.”  I do not actually believe that this is true as any acquaintance with nomadic culture quickly shatters the idea that the nomad simply wanders.  However, I think what is important is the perception that digital culture facilitates restless exploration, hence my over-enthusiastic employment of arrows which I see as being the antithesis of nomadic thought and yet seem symptomatic of “click here”.

The image is quite large so please click on it to see it shown in a new window.

Mini ethnography: Learner Independence SIG

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