Sharon's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

I’m not sure what this final post should ideally be, but part of me doesn’t want to write it. Is it that I do not want this to come to an end or that I do not want to let it go or set it free?

So I took the easier route and spent today being creative – another artefact to close the course. The Flipbook tool choice was my husband’s suggestion – I had planned a ZooBurst pop-up book but was hitting a problem when it came to representing everyone. He said that it would be better if I had a flip-page image of me transforming into “cyborg Sharon” – tying the end up with the beginning – and so it has become. (Apologies still to everyone – I could only manage smileys and flowers – so you became smiles and rainbows, which is how I think of you – etheric cyborgs one and all )

What I hope my lifestream shows is how much creative inspiration I have taken from this course. How the tasks, readings, tweets and Tumblings, music and musings have woven themselves together to create a tapestry of my learning process. I have to remind myself that it doesn’t end here – I have taken so much from this that I wished I had time to spend with, and now I have been given that wish.

Every living thing has a life of its own – and my lifestream is most certainly alive. Looking back on the elements of the lifestream, reading through my offline journal – now updated and digitised – I’m aware of how important this journalling process has been.

Comments I made, notes to myself at the beginning, are far enough from me now in time that I can look and be inspired anew, or reminded of things I thought I would do and have forgotten – or haven’t started yet. This isn’t the past, it’s a guide for the future, for me anyway.

It is not simply that my “digital life” has been recorded here, but more that my thoughts, reflections and collections have taken on their own life – drawing energy from the web when I click the Publish switch. Once that happens, they cease to be “mine” and are shared with everyone, become part of their thoughts, their comments adding to my posts, their observations adding to my work in the same way that I hope my comments add to theirs.

My last Tumbr post for the lifestream talks about the inspiration of the hazel tree. Like hazel, I have delved my roots deeply into my lifestream – others have been like the salmon sharing their knowledge with me, and I hope I have shared a few kernels of knowledge along the way Like this reflection, my Flipbook artefact is cyclical (by tool design rather than my ability, but all things are connected!). One key thing our work together showed is that, with culture, nothing is “new”, simply blended with, adding to and building on those that have gone before us.

What we post this year has come from the inspiration of our lives and those students who came before us, and I like to think that maybe this may inspire those who come after us too.

Thank you Jen, Sian and everyone on the course – and see you all in Second Life on Monday!

The picture below is my lifestream given “face and form” – and I think I’m ready to let her go.

The last weekly reflection – this time next week, it’ll be the final overall reflection. I wish I could have made this course run longer – it feels like we’ve only just started. I know that’s the point, that we’re now supposed to leap in and learn from our personal experiences from this point on (thinking about Marie’s posthuman pedagogy task!), but still I’m going to miss the camaraderie of the course space.

This week, thanks in no small part to Alastair McIntosh, I got my essay title in place, and a rough idea of how I am going to approach it. But that is very much only the start – I’m glad I’ve got another week for discussing and clarifying and fine-tuning.

I shared a link at the beginning of the week to an essay entitled Franken-Rat. This exploration of what it means to become posthuman from the physiologic influencing the spiritual/psychologic state I found really interesting, quite a deep reflection – plus I like the symborg (human-virus symbiotic cyborg) reflection fascinating. Not sure how I can “use” it visibly, but it’s brewing away in my head.

I also posted some other delicious links – including one to the Experience Project, which I spotted as a comment in an article on winter. I thought it sounded wonderful, but I’ve spent some time investigating it since. Many of the “communities” or groups only have a small membership – though I have joined some for nature that may be of use in my essay (nevermind my life). It’s interesting, perhaps not as wonderful as I thought earlier in the week, but then, it may prove me wrong! I did briefly consider it might be an interesting format for my essay – particularly if I went down the mini-auto-ethnography route. Still pending that one, as it would be interesting to see if I had any input – members joining my group and commenting on my life stories.

Discussions with Jeremy on his shamanistic posthuman pedagogy task have been great – that shamanistic aspect of learning has touched something for me – that blending of ontology and epistemology perhaps that is echoed in my own essay topic choice. The feedback from others on my posthuman pedagogy task was so profound. I love that – I love how other people’s comments help you to see and understand your own work so much better.

Tweets sharing good resources and commenting on Michael and James’ superb essay idea and poll to #ededc, but also “personal” tweets (i.e. not to #ededc) with two examples of the use of social networking to reach larger groups. The first – a “rethink” of journalism using social media and crowdsourcing. We’re already using this to some extent, but it was good to see it in one article. The second, a man who was deeply affected by stories of the rape and resulting trauma undergone by women in the Congo. He didn’t just think “oh that’s dreadful” and then leave it at that – he ran, he tweeted and posted and raised awareness. He visited, he took action – and he hasn’t given up. So many of us think and reflect but don’t “do” or let a feeling of helplessness overcome us – “what can I do, what difference will it make?”.

On a lighter note, more tweets on the weather – and the joy of the snow compounded by impacts on work (working from home, loss of electricity and internet connection) and home (oh my poor plants!).  I thought the picture below summed our week up nicely…

Soil, Soul and Society: the Responsibility of Being Posthuman

Our readings from weeks 8-10 raised the same issues of what it means to be “posthuman”, and we noticed that responsibility (to other humans, other creatures, other “things”, our planet, ourselves) and awareness of that responsibility are key factors in the debate.

Throughout this course, I have been swirling around the dualism shown in my original artefact – the greenwoman/machine hybrid – and each week added a new layer to that until it’s now positively geologic! I was concerned for a while that I wasn’t moving beyond this, but now I wonder if I was, in fact, coming full circle – at least as much as I could manage anyway

The problem lay in trying to decide *what* to do, nevermind how to do it. How to take a subject so huge, with so many tantilising sideroads I could travel down so easily? I was finding it hard to tie myself down to one clear route. Angus et al.’s (2001) paper from last week (A Manifesto for Cyborg Pedagogy) made me smile, as I could see I was having the same problems as Geoff with his cup of coffee.

Image copyright by Martin Liebermann/zeitspuren

I’m dipping in and out of Davis’ Techgnosis at the moment, but also reading Alastair McIntosh’s Rekindling Community: Connecting People, Environment and Spirituality. It was from this that I got my title, as I love the triune of terms – very Celtic

Further inspiration and confirmation arrived on Sunday with an interview with Margaret Atwood – her blending of science and literature echoes the work we have been reading and the thoughts I have been having. Likewise, she blends a dystopian vision (reminiscent of James Lovelock’s Gaia theories) with a determiniation not to let that prevent her from becoming involved in “good causes” – supporting the connections in her life.

In my essay, I will discuss this connection of being, knowing and doing in connection with each other and the land, in part as a reflection of what it means to be a “responsible posthuman”, and in part as an examination of ways in which we can become more active and how the web supports, facilitates and perhaps also acts as a barrier to this action. That sounds very clear and confident when I read it back, but I’m not really. Like everything on the MSc though, I find that when I throw myself into it, the “doing” teaches as I go.

I was intending to follow James’ example and use Issuu, but I’ve changed my mind and decided to use Blogger – mainly because that means that, whatever happens to this blog in the future, the essay will “stay with me”, if that makes sense? I’m also pondering a build in Second Life, and again creating the essay in Blogger will allow me to pull links from the blog into the build and vice versa – suitably weaving as appropriate.

I still have to figure out my criteria – that’s always the hardest part for me!

Any ideas, suggestions, tweaks and questions are very welcome