Final summary

The tumblog experiment in this course essentially demonstrates how students experience  “disaggregation and reaggregation – taking things apart, scattering them across the network, and then having them put back together by the machine.”

To me the tumblog experience was also about the creation of an online blogging identity through the weeks, and understanding the digital and eLearning community, by being immersed in the culture.  There has been constant reassessment and negotiation of the boundaries, and defining the relationship of digital culture and elearning culture (Edwards, 2010).

I have experimented with multimodal, transliteracy elements, and considered how my tumblog content may exclude or include readers, and how visual digital literacy is enacted in different publications, and considered how or what people present or project as themselves online.  There were also the constant considerations for what might an academic discourse and essay look like if text was not the dominant medium.  My creation of several digital artefacts such as the virtual ethnography are examples of images taking precedence over text.

I have felt like I am both a virtual ethnographer and a futuristic archaeologist, trying to come to terms and make sense of the rich cultural life of the elearning and digital world, which although I am part of, I have only been on the periphery of this world.  The study of posthumanism and narratives of dystopia and utopia have really forced me to think about what digital culture really means in a variety of context and locations.

The tumblog also reflected the rhizomatic development of links and ideas where I have digressed to non-digital cultures a few times, to enable me to look at the topic afresh.  Some examples of this were in the automobile Prezi in Week 5, and also the posts related to fashion or hair design.  One of the more pertinent fragments drawn from the internet was the paper from Heidegger on Ontological Education which gives the background for where posthuman ideas evolved from.

I rather prefer Heidegger’s idea of deconstruction which is “not to destroy our traditional Western educational institutions but to ‘loosen up’ this ‘hardened tradition and dissolve the concealments it has engendered’ (Thompson, 2001). In contrast, the posthuman idea of man and nonhuman existing in the same continuum is continually presented as a novel condition for humanity, for which no previous educational approaches suitable. However, I found that the authors never explained why previous technology did not divorce humanity from itself. I argue these technologies have made us more human than less, which I will develop in my final essay.

Finally, reflecting on the selected imagery that captured my thoughts and emotions by Kasey Mccahon, called Connected in Week1,  I can compare this with the Portrait of a Posthuman by Eva Rorandelli, which sums up some of the Posthuman elements in human identity, posted in Week 12.  My vision of digital culture, derived from the mash-up of different sources from the web, through reflection, discussion, will now be consolidated in my final assignment.

Reference:

Edwards, R. (2010). The end of lifelong learning: A post-human condition? Studies in the Education of Adults, vol 42, no 1, 5-17.

Thompson, I (2001) Heidegger on Ontological Education, or: How We Become What We Are in Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy Volume 44, Issue 3, 2001 Accessed 03/04/2013