As the stream content from this week illustrates, I’ve mainly been working my way through the additional readings for the first block, going to the cinema to watch ex-machina, taking part in the Google Hangout on Friday 30th January, making my week 3 artefact and tweeting about various ‘stuff’ out there on the net as they relate to the course
I’ve put up a separate post to explain the rationale behind my visual artefact, and how it links to the core themes in the course thus far. My main work this week though, has been trying to bring the knowledge and understanding I’ve been developing around digital culture, to education in general and my role as a University Lecturer in particular. What I think is coming through in my lifestream activity is a growing understanding of the tensions and complexities that exist in this relationship. Digital culture can be both a voice of dissent to current trends in marketisation and managerialism in higher education and a means through which such agendas are furthered. Digital technologies can help to challenge Humanist notions of ‘possessive individualism’ (see Hayles, 1999) in education, though for example, forging greater connections between learners, yet can also be used to promote notions of leaners as consumers, as highlighted by Bayne (2014).
Dualisms such as the digital native vs digital immigrant continue to abound in debates around technology and higher education (see for example my tweet to the article in this week’s Times Higher Education). The continuation of these (distinctly modernist) attempts at classifying and simplifying the digital landscapes of education serve only to reveal how complex an assemblage digital education currently is.
References
Bayne, S. (2014) What’s the matter with technology-enhanced learning? Learning, Media & Technology 40(1): 5-20.
Haraway, D. (2007). A cyborg manifesto. In: Bell,D., ; Kennedy, M. (Eds). The Cybercultures Reader. London: Routledge. Pages: 34-65,
Hayles, K. (1999). Towards embodied virtuality. How We Became Posthuman : Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, ILL: University of Chicago Press. Pages: 1-25.