This week I have engaged in various different posthumanism debates partiulary around Cyber-punk culture ideologies and digital memories. After a Monday evening screening of Blade Runner, I was able to identify what constitutes Cuber-punk and how it is seen within different texts. Is the narritive always dystopian or is there room for a utopian elemant, and is there room between the two to create a new genre ?
The film-festival was a unique opportunity to share ideas and explore different arguments and subtexts within the short films, and something I hope to try out with learners in the future. Some interesting ideas around self-awareness emerged as well as concepts about digital memories and the role they play in determining what makes us human. By commenting upon the various texts from the film festival, I was able to draw my own conclusions and then have them challanged by my peers, opening a new window of discussion which only increased my interest in the pieces.
Some key questions are starting to emerge such as what are the boundaries, relationships, challanges? and is natural better than artifical or is it just natualistic fallacy?
A week 3 arrives, I have the opportunity to explore a lot of these new ideas as well as discuss key themes with others, and I look forward to what emerges next.
Good summary here Ben, and your lifestream in general is shaping up nicely. I like that you have lots of comments feeding in, and this really helps to surface the discussions that are happening around the blogs – nice work. Two things that you could build on here are: 1. more commentary on the specific lifestream content each week, and 2. some reflection on educational concerns.
Firstly, I notice that you’ve got your tweets feeding into the lifestream, so it would be good to experiment with some different recipes in IFTTT now that we are entering week 3 – you could perhaps try getting your YouTube favourites to feed in? Or perhaps some bookmarks for Delicious or Diigo? This will give you some more content to reflect upon in the lifestream summaries.
Secondly, you’ve highlighted some really important themes around posthumanism, cybercultures, and memory, which is fantastic. As we’re working towards the end of this block, it would be good to try and consolidate these explorations by coming back to the question of education. How have these cultural understandings of human, technology and memory fed into the ways we understand education technology? The Bayne (2014) core reading will be good here.