DomBlog

I have enjoyed writing my blog and reading and commenting on the blogs of my peers. I feel that the process has encouraged valuable reflection on e-learning in the English and History classroom and inspired me to creatively integrate ICT into my professional practice in the following years. The process has also allowed me to develop skills in blogging and podcasting that I am sure I will use to good effect throughout my teaching career. I have found the readings on constructionism interesting, particularly those like Papert’s that suggest a more measured approach to ICT in the classroom.

Glancing back over my postings, I get a fairly pessimistic impression of my view of digital learning and teenage digital culture but, having engaged in this process of reflection, I feel optimistic about the future of education. Like Sisyphus, I feel strongly that “the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart” (Camus). I realise that there is much to be gained in throwing oneself in at the digital deep end and engaging with technology, highly imperfect though it is.

At times, my postings have been highly theoretical and based on readings beyond those specified. This reflects both my own preoccupations and a belief that the field of e-learning needs to be opened up to a genuine multi-disciplinary approach. In order to understand digital learning and anticipate potential hazards, we must come to terms with the boundaries and nature of cyberspace.

I remain convinced that Prensky goes too far in suggesting a “singularity” has taken place in terms of the digital divide that exists between students and their teachers and that suggestions that we should build digital sandcastles instead of real ones are absurd. However, I accept that the creative use of a range of learning technologies are essential to the proper study of English and History in the 21^st century. Overwhelmingly, I feel that a creative and measured approach to the incorporation of ICT into the curriculum is what is required.

There has been a lot of talk on edublogs about whether or not teachers are equipped to deal with the demands of the digital classroom and, ultimately, I feel that it is pointless waiting for staff to catch up with technology. Technology will continue to develop and the best we can do as teachers is to make constructive use of it as it does. Similarly, those that endorse waiting for reliable technology will be waiting a long time. Technology will keep one step ahead of reliability and this unreliability is the source of its enormous potential.

One of the biggest problems I found in the readings was the lack of impartiality of the authors. Due to the enormous resources devoted to e-learning, almost all authors appear to have a financial interest in the questions they are researching and discussing. This has obvious implications for the quality and veracity of their findings.

In terms of my own practice, I am determined that I take the lessons I have learned into the classroom next year. In particular, I hope to incorporate ICT into my lessons in such a way that it develops the skills, knowledge and understanding, both ICT related and KLA specific, of my students. The use of technology is far from a guarantee of quality teaching and it is very easy to use badly. However, given the current syllabuses, technology has become an essential ingredient to quality teaching.

Technology, then, is one part of the puzzle but also an important tool in completing the whole, a “new medium for creative design and expression” (Resnick, 2006, p. 1) offering enormous promise for teaching and learning.

References:

Camus, A. The Myth of Sisyphus. Retrieved November 4, 2008 at http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/msysip.htm 

Harel, I. (2003). Sand castles go digital. Retrieved August 4, 2006 at: 
http://www.mamamedia.com/areas/grownups/new/21_learning/sand_castles.html

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1–2. Available:  (NB. can do ‘natives’ test here: 

http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/articles/digitalnatives/index.htm )

Resnick, M. (2006). Computer as Paintbrush: Technology, Play, and the Creative Society. In Singer, D., Golikoff, R., and Hirsh-Pasek, K. (eds.), Play = Learning: How play motivates and enhances children’s cognitive and social-emotional growth. Oxford University Press.

Resnick’s paper on the potential for the computer to provide a “new medium for creative design and expression” presents an extremely positive and realistic vision of the constructivist classroom of the future. A classroom in which the computer is analogous to the paintbrush as a means of creative expression.

Resnick is quick to point out that more often than not computers are not used in this way, a view confirmed by my teaching experience. However, despite giving several positive examples, Resnick fails to demonstrate how we are going to encourage a shift towards these practices.

The case of Alexandra is a good one and, once again, suggests benefits to do with motivation derived from digital learning but fails to demonstrate improved achievement.

Resnick’s discussion of the question of edutainment versus playful learning is particularly pertinent.  

Returning to unreliability, some of my peers suggest we should stick our heads in the sand until staff are trained and technology is sufficiently reliable. To them I say that the horse has bolted.

Technology will continue to keep one step ahead of reliability.

Equally, given its aporiatic nature, one step behind.

As a teacher in the digital classroom we are like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the hill only to have it roll back down again before reaching the top. As Camus suggests, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” for “the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart”.

Technology may be frustrating, but the challenges it presents are valuable opportunities for teaching and learning. This is the strength of the constructionist classroom. 

Reflecting on practicum, “generalised accident” seems like a reasonable description of the use of ICT I observed in the classroom. Much of the problems revolved around the unreliability of technology. I find the nature of this unreliability interesting; not so much a contingent unreliability of specific technology but a necessary unreliability of technology itself. A kind of ghost in the shell of technology that cannot be exorcised by computer experts or anti-virus software.

I am not suggesting a fatalistic approach to technology in the classroom that views it as inevitably impossible. On the contrary, we must accept that the proliferation of technology is itself viral in nature.

No amount of digital prophylaxis will protect you.

As we have already suggested, it is no accident that cyberspace emerges alongside a theoretical tradition that embraces the third term or middle articulation (Mittlglied), the emergence of fatal theory mirroring the fatality (death?) of Newtonian physics and space in the wake of cyberspace.
One of the most relevant articulations of the third term to cyberspace is Derrida’s reading of Khōra in Plato’s Timaeus. For Derrida, khora is more than just space or place, becoming the ultimate receptacle.

While fundamentally non-substantial, cyberspace is never empty (or full), representing a substantial nothingness analogous to the black hole, simultaneously a point of absolute mass and a point at which all mass, all matter, disappears. More accurately, cyberspace is the embodiment of a khoratic receptacle, not an empty geometric space, but always occupied. Further, cyberspace is categorised by the radical oscillation of the khora, that is, oscillation between different kinds of oscillation, specifically exclusion (neither/nor) and participation (both/and).

In khora, Derrida sees the possible articulation of a logic outside of logos (and, hence, outside of ergon which implies reason and fact as well as work or deed). The mythic logic at the heart of khoratic oscillation is usually considered of secondary importance or parergonal. This subordination of the mythic is largely due to myth’s problematic genealogy. As Derrida suggests, with each distancing or mythologising of the accounts that make up the action of the Timaeus, the author gets farther and farther away and, in getting farther, the mythic khora loses its father. Khora is not woman then, despite the analogy of khora as mother or nurse and the obvious wombal and vaginal charecterisation of khora as ultimate receptacle. Rather, khora is a bastard child.

Cyberspace shares this problem of (the name of) the father, its weak etymological origin pointing to a more serious problem to do with the origins. Cyberspace, as a non-physical terrain born of computer systems, does not fit into traditional cosmology. Particularly problematic is the question of cyberspace’s genealogy.

This will become clearer if we return to the fundamentals of cyberspace. According to a Lacanian reading, fundamentum is necessarily associated with pudendum (genitals), remaining squarely within the sexual or, at very least, the homosexual in which fundament and pudendum are truly inseparable. The shift from ergon to parergon and the emergence of cyberspace can, subsequently, not be read as a wholesale shift from the masculine to the feminine. As Zizek suggests, such an analysis misses the point that “a cyborg monster has no sex, it is aesexual in the sense of a Lacanian lamella”. Similarly, cyberspace must be read as aesexual in that it participates in the loss of animal sexuality in the emergence of the all too human. This can be seen in the status of ideology in cyberspace; in the absence of any positive or guiding principle, negativity, and all ideology is rendered empty, in that it fails to recognise and embrace the immanent emptiness that is of the order of cyberspace. Of the order of Khora.

Cyberspace is outside of (divine) creation. Associated with demiurge, etc…

While there is definitely a special relationship between cyberspace and the third term, it remains unclear to what extent cyberspace fulfils the social function of the third term represented by the socially cohesive wound of Bataille. The other side of the equation is that we may already have arrived at the generalised accident of Virilio in the incorporation of the “logics” of cyberspace into physical reality.

The space that remains to be broached “in order to give place to the truth in painting” is the parergon, that space outside of work or of the usual space of work, but not, properly speaking, outside of (the) work. Analogous to the passe-partout of the framer, the parergon, in a sense, inhabits and supports the frame but is simultaneously obscured by and obscures the frame in refusing to be framed and itself framing, in both senses of the word, both work and frame.

Immediately apparent is the privileged relationship that cyberspace would share with such a space. Rather than simply an unbounded, infinite space cyberspace always already inhabits the boundary, at once the “space” in between inside and outside and the point at which they intersect, eroding such distinctions. Like the parergon, then, cyberspace converges at the boundary, in the case of cyberspace, at the interface and, just as “(t)he internal edges of a passe-partout are often beveled” , that is, as it approaches the work (ergon), cyberspace bevels as it approaches its edges (both internal and external). More accurately, cyberspace seems to fray as you move away from the edge towards the centre. Our experience of cyberspace is of the edge, the interface and, as Zizek points out, we are encouraged to “take things at their interface value” in cyberspace, with little concern for what lies beneath. As I have suggested, the digital code that supports these boundaries is unknown to most of us and, increasingly, to us as a group.

The extent to which physical reality participates in the shift to the periphery characteristic of cyberspace can be seen Virilio’s speculations on the modern city; in which, as people move uniformly out from the centre, the “centre will be nowhere and the circumference everywhere” . To look at it another way, we will be left with a hyper-abundance of centres, an abundance of points all incapable of pointing to anything, reminiscent of the absolute proximity of subject and text in cyberspace.

Before we go too far into cyberspace’s relationship with the boundary in general, it may be useful to first consider the fundamentals of cyberspace, the fundamentum always a boundary of sorts.
The term “cyberspace” was coined by William Gibson in his science fiction novel Neuromancer. Already this suggests that cyberspace is to theory what scientology is to religion. Cyberspace’s etymology is weak; the cyber from the Greek κυβερνήτης (steersman or governor) via cybernetics. Cyber is to steer or govern, then, but also to gamble (κυβεύω) and, by association, chance and deceit or trickery. The link between cyberspace and the tuché of Lacan, through which we “encounter” the real, is becoming clearer, tuché meaning chance, the encounter with the real a chance (accidental) encounter.

Parergon (πάρεργον) is, by definition of only secondary importance, a category subordinate to the main enquiry, but in cyberspace, we see the realisation of Derrida’s project of bringing the parergon to the fore. It is naive to think that such a move can be achieved at no cost, for as Paul Virilio’s formula for new technology, “who loves well punishes well”, reminds us, there is no such thing as the unilateral gift. Cyberspace in framing or punctuating space necessarily frames, sets up, space. Cyberspace inevitably consumes space as the boundary infringes on the open, parergon on ergon, medium on message … you get the picture. Once again, as the city moves into the periphery the centre, indeed the very idea of a centre, disappears.

For Virilio, this has to do with the accident that is built into all technology; “to invent the train is to invent derailment” …. Virilio believes that at the end of this process, with the total acceptance and absolute incorporation of technology into everyday life, awaits the generalised accident. Cyberspace certainly appears to be close to this end; in that in cyberspace we see a much greater incorporation of the accident (“symptom” in Hegelian terms) into the system itself. This would, at once, render cyberspace the ultimate technology and provide a new understanding of the generalised accident and its consequences.

In 2003 I presented a paper at a conference on cyberspace in Prague. At the time, I was interested in the metaphysical boundaries of cyberspace in the belief that cyberspace, like all spaces, would be best understood through an investigation of that which delineates it. However, I fear that I may have set myself an impossible task, in that, in the case of cyberspace, such an encounter, with the essence or truth of cyberspace, like the Lacanian encounter with the real, is forever missed as a result of the special relationship that I suggest exists between cyberspace and the boundary itself, the boundary always already the split through which one encounters, as encounter forever missed, the real.

The shift to the periphery, that I suggested is a key feature (the essence?) of cyberspace, is not limited to cyberspace, but is a broad trend in society and in theory. In particular, I suggested that cyberspace inhabits the same space as much contemporary theory, particularly that of Jacques Derrida whose concepts of Khōra and parergon provide a new model for cyberspace and its relationship with the boundary. This new model will provide a better understanding of cyberspace’s relationship with real space and, subsequently, its impact on visuality.

Our encounter with cyberspace might, in fact, be already twice missed to the extent that everything is already reducible to digital code, to the metaphysical laws of cyberspace. Just as cyberspace attempts to put on an (inter)face as close to physical reality as possible, the real world is informed by the logics of cyberspace. One need not look far for examples of this; most of our communication is already mediated by computational cyber-code even if we still need prosthetic devices to translate for us. You get a sense of this when you receive a document written in a different computer format – the code remains visible in the indecipherable mistranslation received. And we have all heard stories of people who already see the world in code, we take comfort in assuring ourselves it is they who are deluded.

The popular view that cyberspace can be seen as a prosthetic extension of the individual, both physical and psychological, attempts to preserve the master/slave dialectic as model for man’s relationship with technology. But as Paul Virilio and most contemporary science fiction suggest, our relationship with technology is far more complicated than this. One need only consider the cyborg to better understand this. The cyborg is not a human supported by technical prosthesis, but a machine that utilises the human, both physically, in the human tissue it uses to mask its “real” form, and emotionally and psychologically in the ideas and behaviour, the very mode of being, that it seduces from the human. The cyborg is representative of the ambiguous relationship we have with technology and that physical reality has with cyberspace. It is easy to see to what extent our society can be said to be cyborgial, both to the extent that we provide the human (inter)face of cyberspace and in as much as the boundaries are already blurred. We would do well to remember the Lacanian formula that feigning is the feigning of feigning itself. In the case of cyberspace, its feigning of total integration into physical reality hides the extent to which it is truly integrated.

Our encounter with cyberspace is twice missed, then, to the extent that we are never not in cyberspace or, at very least, a space punctuated by cyberspace. This has several implications for teachers. First, we must abandon the retarded view that cyberspace is limited to the World Wide Web or that it ever could be, and extend the scope of our investigations accordingly. If we acknowledge that the popular fear that cyberspace will evolve out of the network is a ruse to convince us that it already has not, then to limit one’s investigation of cyberspace to the www is to fall for the trap. Equally, the conservative attitude that Zizek suggests we should adopt towards new technologies in their infancy is impossible in the case of cyberspace. Accordingly, what is required is a radical analysis of cyberspace.

I’m more reluctant than Miriam to accept the assertions of Microsoft Australia on the benefits of ICT in and out of the classroom. As far as I can tell, the jury is still out on the links between ICT and student achievement and Microsoft have an obvious interest in suggesting a causal, beneficial link between the two.

Any study in the area needs to consider the extent to which cultural capital comes into play in assessing student achievement as well as socio-economic factors relating to access to technology.
The focus of the winning teachers appears to have been on increasing student engagement and making learning fun. I have written about the apparent link between ICT and student motivation and feel that a stronger case needs to be made for digital learning if it is to justify the funding it is attracting.

Scott appears to be buying into the idea that collaboration, networks, connections, participation, community and meaningfulness have all emerged out of cyberspace.

Like the pharmakon, technology is at once medicine and poison. In terms of community, it may well erect as many bridges as it burns.

Pharmakos is also a scapegoat!