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

In Penderson (2010) Is posthuman educable?, I looked at the reference to humanist traditions and the different strands of interpretation of the posthuman adoption of the past. In my second post, a link to a blog discussion on connectivism as posthuman pedagogy which questions the absence of epistemology in the theory.  In my third post, I decided to collect a few more links for reference to what is being done already on posthuman pedagogy or its interpretation for education.  And my last post this week, I attempted to reflect how I could embrace the language of posthumanism in my post, and also focused on Gough’s rhizomANTic paper which illustrated an example of anthromorphism or reflexivity, and finally in Angus et al (2001), I raised some questions on the interpretation of connections used by posthumanist writers.

On reflection, I am slowly  beginning to think beyond the binaries of  promise/threat and dystopia/utopia.   I am able to proceed to the second process of scattering the ideas on my blog this coming week.

Reference:

Angus, T, Cook, I, Evans, J et al (2001) A Manifesto for Cyborg Pedagogy? International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, vol 10, no 2, pp.195-201.

Gough, N. (2004). RhizomANTically becoming-cyborg: performing posthuman pedagogies. Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol 36, no 3, 253-265

Pedersen, H. (2010). Is the posthuman educable? On the convergence of educational philosophy, animal studies, and posthumanist theory. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, vol 31, no 2, 237-250.

Edwards provided a number of binaries that illustrate the epistemological-ontological separation.(Edwards, 2010: 8)

epistemology – ontology
meaning – matter
significance – substance
subject – object
theory – practice
knowing – becoming
apparent- real
reflecting – intervening
thinking – doing
representing – experimenting

This sums up his description of a post-human education which I would like to consider further this week:

“Here a post-human condition could position responsible experimentation as a gathering of the human and non-human to establish matters of concern…it is not the human subject who learns through experimenting rather than representing, but the thing that is gathered which is an enactment of human and non-human elements.There is a decentring of the knowing/learning human subject within educational practices.”(Edwards, 2010: 13)

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.