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

I started by googling for issues of posthuman identity and found the portrait of a posthuman by a visual artist.  The description of her work is useful as a starting point for reference to identity, where the human is seeking a comfortable position for herself in the world she inhabits.  I thought the selection of fabrics to reflect identity was also an important one. It led me to think about the identity of an educator, which is discussed in the essay on Heidegger.

The second and third posts are focused on pedagogical approaches.   This time I tried searching using the words: ontology, identity, becoming, design.   A Phantasmal Media Approach to Empowerment, Identity and Computation was an interesting find, and it gives me more to consider about the idea of identity in the virtual world. I thought the dynamic construction of social categories identities (body language, discourse, metaphorical thought, gesture, fashion) as an addition to the normally used categories such as class,  gender, sex, race and ethnicity was realistic and I can see that for the younger generation the other categorisation is more prevalent.

The final link was a paper on Heidegger about Ontological Education, or: How We Become What We Are (Iain Thomas).  This will be an important reference for my final assignment.  I will compare Heidegger’ with the language used in the cyborg pedagogy.  There is correlation between the two.

My final post for this week contains some preliminary thoughts on my final assignment. The narrative is written down to allow for the flow of ideas to begin.

I have spent some time responding to final posts by colleagues, especially those that touch on their final assignment.