Noreen's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

Moving on from the exploration of ways to explore and symbolise humans and technology to ways of encapsulating the post-human in our pedagogy, I’ve also been reading articles by Edwards and Bayne and finalising the focus of my final assignment.

My final life stream entry of the week, the post-human pedagogy task used Second Life as it’s context. This sprang partly from the blog entry and the idea of ‘gathering’ and ‘entanglement’ and partly from a task I had created in my work context, for teaching students about personal finance. Students were asked to ‘collect’ various objects and pieces of information in SL in order to experiment or experience the process of planning a prom.

In terms of the assignment, I’m interested in looking at some aspect of the role of narrative in human culture and cyberculture. Again, I have been collecting retweets and articles about storytelling and narrative. I am trying to narrow down the focus to the uses of narrative in social media such as Twitter whilst still maintaining an interest in learning.

In order to make sense the weekly reading, particularly Edwards, I used the context of Second Life and my avatar, Simone, to look at the link between human and non-human in learning. The whole idea of the combination of ‘knowing as doing’ and gathering and experimentation seemed ideal for the virtual environment, where, as Bayne says, we are pushed out of our comfort zone. However, even in Second Life, experiencing a kind of discovery or active learning, we are still subjects, relating to virtual objects, acquiring knowledge. Representationalism still reigns – there is virtual Berlin, Paris etc in SL and classes tend to take a similar format to real University of Edinburgh classes.