Classrooms are already post-human.

Transcript:

I’ve worked out my discomfort with post-human teaching.

Students are already de-centred in the classroom. (I was reading bell hoooks & thinking about this). They are already understood as “happy robots” (to quote Paul Giroux). They already write & learn for machine marking (in SATS and Turnitin). They post-human classroom is here & it’s not a good classroom: not good for teachers, or learners, or communities. Not good for emploers, or knowledge transfer, or thinking. Not good for critical pedagogies, democracies, industries.

What is central are computerized systems of control:
The PowerPoint
Echo360
Turnitin
The laptop note taking.

I have radical lectures … where I don’t use PowerPoint. That’s what’s radical. That’s ridiculous.

We need to be post-post-human in the classroom. To re-centre the student & the teacher & the things we are learning about.

We may consider centring the earth, animals, systems or objects, but we must stop centring the technologies.

[It] leaves behind the traditional LMS-based “course” model of the MOOC, and will be left to roam wild, free, and grass-fed on the web. Once each week, we’ll hold a hashtag chat on Twitter using #MOOCMOOC. We’ll also hold a series of Google Hangouts On Air featuring guests from the field and from our community.

Unlike our previous MOOCs, this one will have homework. Or, more precisely, MOOC MOOC: Critical Pedagogy will be a massive open online book club.

I’ll be joining the group just as they start to read Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy. It’s in the University of Melbourne Library, so I must go and check it out, (I find I read non-fiction books much more easily in paper, though I’m happy to read fiction or articles electronically). But, as always, the instant access of ebooks makes study so much easier. (I have already opened the first page of the book, without leaving my desk).

I wanted to study a MOOC where I would learn from the content as well as the ethnography, and I’m personally attracted to a community, public, ‘grass-fed’ MOOC, even as I wonder if it would work.