My Digital Artefact

My Digital Artefact

What have I learnt from E-Learning and Digital Cultures?

If the slides are too slow, click to the next slide

How to be creativeUnderstand the differences between utopia and dystopiaDiscover other social media to express yourselfBeing philosophical again!

Learning new ways to create artistic photosJoining in the discussions on Twitter feedsFinding out what is still out thereLearning to overcome other tech boundaries

Here is one picture of plurality!

One on Surveillance Technology!

6Here is the creative side that I did discovered

So much to learn and absorb!Utopian claimsDystopian claimsInformation technologies based on electronic computation possess intrinsically democratizing properties (the Internet and/or worldwide web is an autonomous formation with in-built democratic properties or dispositions).Information technologies possess intrinsically de-democratizing properties (the Internet and/or worldwide web is an autonomous formation with in-built anti-democratic properties or dispositions).Information technologies are intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend themselves to democratizing global forces of information creation, transfer and dissemination.Information technologies are intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend themselves to control by de-democratizing forces (hardware and software ownership equals anti-democratic control).Cyber-politics is essentially a pragmatic or instrumental task of maximizing public access to the hardware and software thought to exhaustively define the technology in question.Cyber-politics is essentially one of resisting and perverting the anti- democratic effects of the technology in question.

Definitely my favourite clip

Click on the picture

A Day made of Glass 2Very clever!

Almost there into Week 4

Still learningIdeas and interpretations

CoreJohnston, R (2009) Salvation or destruction: metaphors of the internet. First Monday, 14(4). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2370/2158

Johnston draws from the key work of Lakoff and Johnson to highlight the important work that metaphors do in shaping our thinking. She identifies two broad categories of metaphors drawn from the titles of editorials about the internet in late 2008 - those that take a utopian perspective (salvation - transformative and revolutionary) and those that are dystopian (destruction - attacking and supplanting). Last week we explored how to identify and consider determinist positions about digital cultures and e-learning. Noticing the sorts of metaphors that are used to draw comparisons between the unfamiliar and the familiar, or the abstract and the concrete, can be another very useful way of understanding the assumptions that people are making about e- learning (the native and the immigrant, for example). In the next perspectives section, we will look at some MOOC-related articles, and this will be a great opportunity to do a bit of metaphor analysis of your own. What examples of both salvation and destruction metaphors can you find in these, or other MOOC reports and editorials? How does Shirkys metaphor of the MP3, for example, create a certain kind of story around the MOOC?

Now the Digital Artefact

Almost there

Very philosophical.Transhumanism is very different from the more critical modes of posthumanism that were touched on last week, in the Badmington article in particular. Where critical posthumanists see posthumanism primarily as a philosophical stance which, among other things, draws attention to the inequalities and injustices often wrought in the name of the human, transhumanists in general see human values as a good, though incomplete, project. For transhumanists, humanity is a temporary, flawed condition: the future of human evolution is in the direction of a post-human future state in which technological progress has freed us from the inconveniences of limited lifespan, sickness, misery and intellectual limitation. Transhumanism, in summary, is to a large extent based on the extension of the humanistic principles of rationality, scientific progress and individual freedom that critical posthumanists would question.

This article by Nick Bostrom (Oxford University) - whose work is at the more academically respectable end of what can be a fairly uneven field - does a good job of summarising the transhumanist position, though its important when reading this to understand that he does not use the term posthuman in the sense that, for example, Badmington does. What is your own response to the values he proposes? Do you find them attractive or repellent? On what basis? Bostrom mentions education a few times here: what might his vision of transhumanism mean for the future of education? What would a transhumanist theory of education look like?

Thoroughly enjoyed it

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