Hand, Martin, (2008) “Hardware to everyware: Narratives of promise and threat”, Making digital cultures : access, interactivity, and authenticity pp.15-42, Aldershot: Ashgate

Pages 15-19 are a great overview of some of the debates we’ve already covered elsewhere (I recognised some of the readings from IDEL, and some articles that Hand cites which cover similar content to Hannam et al (2006), Leander et al (2010) and Licoppe (2004)). This is a useful place to come back to when starting some of my own research.

First Generation Web studies: the 1990s.

Hand deconstructs the binary that “‘first generation’ Web studies” (1990s) constructed of ‘cyberspace’ and meatspace (19-20). The new world of ‘cyberspace’ was an imagined utopia: democratic, post-national (or trans-national), anarchic, interactive, globalised. (Later, he will show a second generation characterising this as a ‘de-democratic e-topia’, p. 32).

Hand suggests that governments perceive that

globally dispersed information represents a threat to traditional stragetegies of information ownership and policing (such as copyright, intellectual property, censorship, surveillance).

As Andrejevic (2013) and others argue, however, new forms of data enables greater control of information: greater censorship, greater surveillance, more draconian control of intellectual property and copyright. I regularly buy novels on my Kindle and then buy a second hard copy so I can loan it to a friend; I can only make 5 copies of a song I bought on iTunes and often lose older songs from too many versions ago; my employer is able to see every article I read, even the stuff I read wirelessly on my tablet in my lunch break; they are able to read the content of every piece of e-mail I send or recieve via my work account, even email I read and write from home.

Hand (2008) p. 23

All of this talk, on page 23-24, of the end of’ vertical’ governance drives me wild. Even in the most seemingly ‘top down’ totalitarian states, various kinds of networks and interactions were taking place. While broadcast communications may have seemed ‘vertical, hierarchical and one-directional’, they were being informed by multiple kinds of interaction, interferrance, and backchannel. The content of the BBC propagandist radio broadcasts during World War II, for example, (the subject of my PhD) was subject to reader surveys, commentary articles, reviews, and correspondence. Moreover, there was a lively analogue backchannel of theatrical reperformance, of in-person discussion, and of personal networks of correspondence. And this is just the things that we know about from archives: all kinds of unrecorded ‘multi-centred, networked and decentralized’ interactions were almost certainly going on. Even in Nazi Germany there is some evidence of this kind of interferrance (I am drawing both on my own research, and Fox (2006) here).

I am completely confused about the idea that it is the Net that will enable a participatory governement. I can’t quite think what people thought we were doing in the ‘old days': not going to sit in Parliament, not reading newspapers, not going to Town Hall meetings, not writing to the editor of the local paper, not printing out flyers, or door knocking, or signing petitions, or protesting. In the same way, I am confused by the argument that the Net enables a new participatory writing culture. I’ve ranted about this before. Hand later calls this ‘digital enchantment’ (p. 36).

I must read Castells, 1996, and 1997a. I think there is a very interesting connection between the trans-national cyberspace utopia, and the neo-liberal utopia of transnational corporations of

restructuring… through governmental efforts to deregulate, privatize, and dismantle the social contract betweeen capital and labour. p. 25.

Hand addresses some of the concerns I raise here in his next section (pp.29-30). For example, he characterises Borja and Castells’ (1996) argument as ‘a fusion of the Greek polis with the technologies of the 21st century’ (29) and cites Brown (1997) linking networked surveillance to Foucault’s panopticon prison.

Finally: on the one hand  Poster 2006 suggests that ‘digital conditions of culture mean thte the creation of works, their unlimited reproduction, and infinite distribution are functions at the disposal of everyone who has access to networked computers’. On the other hand, as pointed out above, DRM. (Hand does talk about DRm, on p. 37). Also, something to do with Borges and the Infinite Library. (I found this fascinating pre-Kindle blog from 2009 while searching for another article (some sort of think-piece in something like the New Yorker, I read some years ago, that I now can’t find.) I’m sure this is significant–even with Google things can be lost).

Second-generation Web studies: the 2000s. 

Digital information does not circulate outside of material structures. p. 28

The internet is incredibly slow in Australia, even in cities. In Melbourne, some suburbs now have fibre-optic cables, but where we live it’s still working on an old telephonic network of copper wires. In rural Australia it is even more problematic. (And the roll out of a National Broadband Network has been stalled for political reasons.) (See hand pp. 33-4 discussing such ‘social informatics’ in the US, UK and Canada. The catagories used for Canada (Erickson, 2002) are most useful to describe the Australian experience).

The imminent explosion of the Internet of Things promises to make this more the case than less (and also underlines some of the inherent risks of a network that is not purely imaginary).

Hands (2008), p. 30

At this moment, Hands uses the term ‘Orwellian': and it is instructive to remember that one of the most terrifying aspects of Orwell’s novel 1984 was the way that as well as  you watching the television, the television watched you.

Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’ (2000) is invoked here, and Bauman reminds us that web-interactivity is hugely asymmetrical. The 1:10:90 rule (see van Mierlo (2014)) reminds us that even in apparently ‘democratic’ and interactive platforms like forums, wikis and social media, only about 1% of users will actually create content; most people will ‘lurk’, or consume the content ‘pure and unalloyed watching is thier lot’ (Bauman, 1998, p. 53)–their contribution limited to upvoting, liking, or just being recorded as clickthroughs. The other 10% are ‘curators’, collecting and sharing the content  created by the 1% out to the consuming 90%. See p.39 for a discussion of how this maps onto digital citizenship vs ‘the “push-button” nature of digitally mediated political life’ (Street 1997).

Like Bauman, Dawson and Foster (1998) agree with Andrejevic (these are the ‘others’ mentioned above):

new technologies actually increase the possibilities of centralized control for some, maintaining existing consertvative sociopolitical practices, rather than undermining or disrupting them. p. 31

This ‘technophobic’, pessimistic view leads into a series of ‘moral panics’ (see Danah Boyd’s work on networked teens, as well as the IoT malware panic linked above).

I’m once again confused through by the historicity of the arguments. The dystopian views of the future imagines ‘monadic citadels’ with ‘neo-feudal’ (Umberto Eco) ghettos (p. 33). This is apprently caused by ‘digital technologies… stripping away the mutual face-to-face bonds of pre-modern forms of community and civility’ (p. 33). PRE-MODERN IS FEUDAL, GUYS. Pre-modern can be good or bad, feudal can be good or bad–I don’t care, but you can’t have your historical cake and eat it too.

I would like to see some discussion of digital citizenship that takes into account major hacks and leaks: most notably Wikileaks (though I realise this only came into global prominence 2 years after Hand’s article was published).

On page 38, Hand finally acknowledges the ‘line of thought weaving through Heidigger, Benjamin and Baudrillard’ (Taylor and Harris, 2005). The age digital reproduction, we might see, as an age of ‘atomized anti-society of privitized consumers of inauthentic simulacra’–concerns we see actively explored in eighteenth-century plays, Victorian novels, 1920s essays, and mid-century films.

***

Unlike earlier live blogs, I wrote this is a circular way, interspersing new references from the article into earlier paragraphs. Hand’s article was subtly parallell, and dialogic, so it made sense to write about it in a mix of referrings back (lots of ‘above’s, which I briefly considered linking as anchors), and interpolating new text.

 

Sian Bayne (2015) What’s the matter with ‘technology-enhanced learning’?, Learning, Media and Technology, 40:1, 5-20, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2014.915851

I remember enjoying the Bayne articles that I read last year, so I’m going into this with some expectation of enjoyment. I’m also aware that this is a blog post with a primary audience of … maybe a dozen people, one of whom is the author of the article. I wonder how much that is going to influence my reading?
[I am using ‘reading’ here in the technical ‘critical analysis put down in writing’ sense; rather than the ‘actual looking at and understanding the words on the page’ sense. This is my literary training coming through, but also the fact that I’m listening to jazz on the radio–where a performance of a composition can be called a ‘reading’ (as Garry Koster does on one of my favourite jazz radio shows). ]

***

Anyway, on to the article!

Getting started

The first paragraph is interesting to read in the context of the change of the name of this course from ‘MSc in E-Learning’ to ‘MSc in Digital Education’. I certainly, in Australia, have not seen the term ‘Technology-Enhanced Learning’ used–I would assume it was a particularly tech-heavy example, perhaps using robotics, or the Occulus Rift. Here, I would use ‘e-Learning’ in general contexts, or something like or ‘instructional design’ to talk about specific jobs in very industry-centric contexts.

I frame the paper around three core questions: What is wrong with ‘technol- ogy’? What is wrong with ‘enhanced’? And finally, what is wrong with ‘learning’? I draw on three different frameworks in addressing each question: first I use insights from science and technology studies to draw into question what we mean by ‘technology’ within this context; I then adopt a position from critical posthumanism to look again at ‘enhancement’; and finally I refer to Biesta’s (2005) work on ‘learnification’ to emphasise what might be problematic in our too-ready use of the ‘language of learning’. (p.8)

Bayne attacks the issue from a multitude of angles. This is effective in an article intended to demonstrate a range and variety of weaknesses, not all of them fatal. From the abstract, I know her intention is to suggest “that we need to be more careful with, and more critical of, the terminology we adopt to describe and determine the field.”

Were Bayne’s intention to make a case for a usable alternative, or to propose that TEL be abolished, this ‘promiscuous’ approach would be more problematic. I’m not sure there is any ‘right’ answer here, though, so a messy ‘cluster’-ing is about right. It is also an example of what Braidotti has suggested, in The Posthuman,  will be the new post-Humanities, ‘web-like, scattered and poly-centred’ (p.164).

What’s wrong with ‘technology’?

In Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, she suggests that ‘writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs’. I’m going to use this to read this section.

Haraway argues:
‘Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. 

Fenwick, Edwards, and Sawchuck (2011) (qtd in Bayne) are arguing something similar:
Learning is an effect of the networks of the material, humans and non-humans, that identify certain practices as learning, which also entails a value judgement about learning as something worthwhile. This teaching is not simply about the relationships between humans, but is about the networks of humans and things through which teaching and learning are translated and enacted. (6)

Learning and technology have been intertwined for millenia. The invention of writing now seems to us ‘natural’, but was of course an extraordinarily disruptive technology. The invention of new kinds of architecture that enabled more people to hear the message (from amphitheatres to lecturns to raked seating); the invention of the blackboard, or the mnemonic…

Or this:

Which kind of suggests we don’t get what ‘learning’ is.

But first we have to deal with ‘enhancement’. 

Enhancement suggests that the underlying thing is generally good, but can be made better, it is ‘simply open to a little improvement and further consolidation via the ministration or utilisation of technology’ (Bayne 2015, p. 11).

What counts as ‘improvement’ is, as Hauskeller (2013) points out, highly context- dependent:
We always need to ask what a better performance in a specific context is good for and, of course also for whom it is good . . . The context determines whether a change is, overall, an enhancement or not. That is why forgetting can be as much an enhancement as remembering. (14–15)

It also suggests that technological intervention improves things, by default. The initialism TEL could be written out ‘technology-enchanced learning’. The hyphen links the adjectival phrase which modifies the noun ‘learning’. In a sentece, it is ‘learning’ that will be the grammatical subject.

Okay, finally, what’s wrong with ‘learning’?

In most instances, when we speak of ‘TEL’ we are in fact referring to technology enhanced teaching, and to institutional goals, rather than to the aims or cognitive gains of individual learners  … To reduce ‘education’ to ‘learning’ prevents us from asking critical questions about how educational goals are negotiated and how its power relations are constituted. (p.15-16)

The discussion here all still rather assumes that it is the education-machine that is getting in the way of learners learning, and not asking some even more basic questions. I quite understand that this isn’t the point of the article, but they are questions I have.

What is learning the opposite of? Is it the opposite of ‘ignorance’ or the opposite of ‘illiteracy’ or the opposite of ‘teaching’?

Is learning always a good thing? We like learning, especially in higher education, and have often made huge sacrifices to have it. I often wonder if those sacrifices are worth it. What disciplinary ground have I gained (and yes, I am using Foucault’s militarised, bodily, training image on purpose), what other kinds of movement and knowing and being have I lost?

Is learning a thing where we get more skills and information? Or more wisdom? Or more kindness? Is there a point where we have enough knowledge (there is ‘information overload’, can there also be a ‘wisdom overload’)?

How do we count what is learning, what is learned, how well it is learned? Might these forms of counting mean that others can be discounted?

Conclusions
Bayne ends:

It is time to re-think our task as practitioners and researchers in digital education, not viewing ourselves as the brokers of ‘transformation’, or ‘harnessers’ of technological power, but rather as critical protagonists in wider debates on the new forms of education, subjectivity, society and culture worked-through by contemporary technological change. (p. 18)

Returning to Haraway:

That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of ‘Western’ idendty, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind.

***

To Read:

Biesta, Gert. 1998. “Pedagogy without Humanism: Foucault and the Subject of Education.” Interchange 29 (1): 1–16.

Biesta, Gert. 2005. “Against Learning. Reclaiming a Language for Education in an age of Learning.” Nordisk Pedagogik 25 (1): 54–66.

Biesta, Gert. 2006. Beyond Learning. Democratic Education for a Human Future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Biesta, Gert. 2010. Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Biesta, Gert. 2012. “Giving Teaching Back to Education: Responding to the Disappearance of the Teacher.” Phenomenology & Practice 6 (2): 35–49.

Biesta, Gert. 2013. “Interrupting the Politics of Learning.” Power and Education 5 (1): 4–15.

Now, when I take notes for academic writing, I use the Cornell Method–which is analogue (handwritten on paper), atemporal (designed to be used again and again across a writing or research project, and its multiple revisions) and strictly analytic (that is, the thoughts, comments and notes I include fit squarely into the tradition of academic writing and logics). It is also, interestingly, less linear, more map-like, with its multiple panes for meta-analysis and reflection.

Live-blogging is is rather a stream-of-consciousness (or rather, I suspect, a form of “free indirect discourse“), rag-bag of links, thoughts, quotes and responses to the reading. This makes it messier than my neat notes, but it makes it more linear chronologically. It therefore lays out clearly my route (rather than my map), my growth and way of getting there. If this sounds fragmentary, repetitious, and kind of modernist, it is. Eliot wrote: “And all is always now“, and texts are always present to the person reading them, and yes, I was thinking about Mrs Dalloway (and Ulysses) when writing this paragraph.

I think that makes it less interesting for anyone else to read, but useful to keep track of my progress–in the same way the ‘Lifestream’ does.

***

So, on with the reading.

In which we nod at the Post-human, the Cyborg, and Homo faber

I’ve already engaged with some of these ideas in a 3-part ‘web essay‘ for IDEL, ‘Embodying Learners in New Media Literacies: Cyborgs, Androids and the Dance Apocalyptic’, which makes extensive use of two of the secondary readings:

Haraway, Donna (2007) A cyborg manifesto from Bell, David; Kennedy, Barbara M (eds),  The cybercultures reader pp.34-65, London: Routledge.

Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) Towards embodied virtuality from Hayles, N. Katherine,  How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics pp.1-25, 293-297, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.

The web essay also makes some use of Clarke (2002). I would like to read more on this, starting with Shilling (see list below). Latour’s later Reassembling the Social is on my summer reading list  already.

In which we get to the bit where mobile phones change everything

I’m always sceptical about these claims, what I have called before the “things are all different now, because interwebs” claim. (Yes, this is another blog-post for IDEL that I reblogged for a wider audience).  I always read these claims about, say, the mobile phone, and wonder… ‘yes, but what about the letter, the telegram? what about film, about portraits, about dageurrotypes? what about short-wave radio, and the telephone?’

For example, how might be understand Van den Berg’s (2009) claims about GPS compared to other traditional methods of navigation?

Miller (2011) p 221

Okay, this is clearly different from, say, an (imaginary) wild tracker who looks at how the moss grows and the direction of the sun and navigates that way.

But I wonder how much this might be like the sailor with his sextant navigating via star charts? Or a cross-country runner using a compass and an ordinance survey map (as in orienteering) ? Or a driver on a motorway, chosing one of a score of identical-looking  exits because of the road signs? All of these modes of navigation also use a “God’s eye” view, a typical aspect of maps since… well, here is an example from 500BC, so we’re looking at 2,500 years.

“Baylonianmaps“. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In the fascinating discussion that emerged from my earlier rant post, I said:

I agree that the internet has made major differences to degree, speed and scale of reading and writing.

And I continue to agree that the ways in which we might be present or not present through mobile phones are made easier, quicker and more portable than ever before. No longer do I need to take an image in a professional studio with a camera the size of a small suitcase, holding my pose for some minutes. The image does not need a complex, multi-stage development and fixing process. Without wrapping it carefully, franking it, and walking it down to a postbox, I can share it with those who are emotionally connected to me but physically distant. Moreover, my recipient needn’t wait for weeks for the steamship to cross the oceans.

Miller (2011) p 221

But anyone who thinks that people in the past were mentally and emotionally ‘with’ the people around them, or ‘in’ the spaces they inhabit, has clearly never read a novel. Not read The Catcher in the Rye, or The Scarlet and the Black, or Northanger Abbey, or seen The Cherry Orchard or The Three Sisters.

Or

Source: http://www.observatoriofucatel.cl/la-necesidad-de-un-diario-publico/

Rant over.

***

To Read:

Shilling, Chris. The body and social theory. Sage, 2012.

Licoppe, Christian. “Connected presence: the emergence of a new repertoire for managing social relationships in a changing communication technoscape.” Environment and Planning D 22.1 (2004): 135-156.

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Review: Since this was a live-blog, I didn’t go back and edit  what I wrote (except to correct typos etc). However, it’s interesting that I was thinking about literature and maps in my reflection about this as a way of taking notes, long before I got to the bit where I was having qualms about mobiles changing human relationships.  I’d quite forgotten about that, though clearly it was still in my mind.