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miércoles, 27 de febrero de 2013
martes, 26 de febrero de 2013
What do we mean by digital culture?
Click on the image and read the different words
The future is in our hands, so I want to express the words that describe better the digital culture. Man is who can change the system and have the power to create a new world, with new relationships between them. There are some contradictions because the digital world is a new land that we have to investigate and kto know. It's difficult to know what's going to happen, but we can imagine the kind of world that we want.Our world is changing by the digital thing but man is who can better change it. If we want to make a better life we have to share our ideas, and the communication has a really important job in this area. In a digital world the communication and relationships have changed. There are not better than before, but they are another kind of and we have to use them. Sometimes we'll prefer ones and anothers the others, it's up to us.
The second point is about how this new communication can affect directly to education. Nowadays schools have to be the reflection of the culture outside the classrooms, but this is untrue. Just the teachers who want to change the world and to create a new communication with the world outside the classrooms, are who can begin to act with the students.
It's not an easy way, but if we want to develope, to advance we have to begin by our students and the power that they have in their hands.
Redefining the human
Robbie: This surprisingly moving short film takes on a core theme of popular cyberculture - the possibility of machinic sentience and the questions advanced artificial intelligence raise about what it means to be human.
A vacuum-cleaning robot actress who doesn’t do hallucinogenics or nudity? Gumdrop will cheer you up after Robbie. She raises many of the same questions, but this time there are differences - literally - of voice and of embeddedness in the human world. For once, the vision of a posthuman future is not dystopic..
True Skin:
‘No-one wants to be entirely organic. No-one wants to get sick, or old, or die. My only choice was to enhance.’ In the future-world of True Skin, synthetic enhancement is normal, and the boundary between human and machinic body has been erased. Where Robbie and Gumdrop look at the human in the robot, True Skin considers the robotic in the human. In particular, you might want to think about the final scene of the movie in which another core sci-fi fantasy - memory backup - is drawn on.
Ideas and interpretations
Bostrom (2005) ‘Transhumanist values’ reproduced from Review of Contemporary Philosophy, Vol. 4, May (2005) http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/values.html
Transhumanism is very different from the more critical modes of posthumanism that were touched on last week, in the Badmington article in particular. Where critical posthumanists see posthumanism primarily as a philosophical stance which, among other things, draws attention to the inequalities and injustices often wrought in the name of ‘the human’, transhumanists in general see ‘human values’ as a good, though incomplete, project. For transhumanists, ‘humanity’ is a temporary, flawed condition: the future of human evolution is in the direction of a post-human future state in which technological progress has freed us from the inconveniences of limited lifespan, sickness, misery and intellectual limitation.
The transhumanist declaration (2009) useful as an additional summary of the transhumanist position.
Hayles, N K (2011) Wrestling with transhumanism. http://www.metanexus.net/essay/ h-wrestling-transhumanism
N Katherine Hayles (Duke University), author of the influential 1999 text How we became posthuman, here constructs a challenge to transhumanism which presents a useful contrast to the Bostrom text; even if you don’t want to delve too much into the advanced reading this week, we’d recommend you read the opening part, simply for the critique Hayles provides of the transhumanist position.
Hayles argues that the framework within which transhumanism considers the future of human evolution and technological advance is ‘too narrow and ideologically fraught with individualism and neoliberal philosophy to be fully up to the task’. Via a critical reading of some classic works of science fiction, she argues that we need a more nuanced, and more politically defensible, series of perspectives than those offered by the theorists and proponents of transhumanist philosophy. The first part of the essay explores some of the problems with the individualistic focus of transhumanism, while the second half uses the literary perspective to more fully explore the issues at stake.
Perspectives on education
System upgrade: realising the vision for UK education (2012) EPSRC Technology Enhanced Learning Research Programme. http://tel.ioe.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/TELtaster.pdf
(The link is to a taster document for the full report, which you will find here).
This report may seem a long way from the sci-fi fantasies and far-fetched human futures envisioned in our other readings and films this week. However, it is presented here as a chance to look at how the themes of enhancement, transformation and technological advance - so important to the literatures and imaginaries of transhumanism - occur and recur, generally unquestioned, across the more everyday literatures of online education.
This reading is a summary of the report from a large, recent UK research programme (2007-12) which was explicitly concerned with the technological enhancement of learning. There is much in the report which is unexceptionable. However, in reading it, you should consider what vision for education and technology is being forged here.
Carr, M. (2008) Is Google making us stupid? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
This final reading pulls together many of the themes we’ve touched on over the period of the course. It’s an interesting one to read alongside the ‘TEL’ report above, thinking about how relations between the human and the technological are differently worked in each. If the TEL report creates a vision in which technology is under individual or societal control (technology in the TEL report is ‘harnessed’, ‘utilised’, ‘developed’, ‘employed’ in the interests of enhancement), in the Carr article it is human faculties which are under the control of the technology. For Carr, our media environments develop their own logic, to which we adapt socially and physiologically. In a return to a now familiar theme, ‘human nature’ and ‘human being’ is ‘made’ in response to technological shift. Yet this ‘making’ of the human is far from the vision of empowerment and enhancement that we have seen in the readings on transhumanism, and in the vision of education and technology that we saw presented in the TEL report.
Reasserting the human
This advertisement for the Toyota GT86 plays on some of the dystopic visions of our immersion in a pixellated simulation of reality which may be familiar from some of the previous clips you’ve looked at. Here, the reality and authenticity of human emotion is aligned with speed, control and a ‘breaking out’ of the artificial into the ‘natural’.
This advert takes on the theme of mediation and, again, the nature of ‘authentic’ human contact.
World builder is a short film which explores some of the same themes (simulation, immersion, artifice) as the Toyota advertisement, though in a slightly more nuanced way.
This short film has a darkly comic grounding idea which we won’t spoil here! The vision of humanity it constructs is one which is rich but also slightly repellent - it works to make the notion of ‘the human’ seem strange.
Ideas and interpretation
View the presentation slides here
Badmington, Neil (2000) Introduction: approaching posthumanism. Posthumanism. Houndmills; New York: Palgrave.http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/0333765389.Pdf
This chapter is the editor’s introduction to a collection of essays by thinkers on posthumanism. It gives a very useful overview of some of the philosophical and cultural bases for arriving at a position we might reasonably call ‘posthuman’. It is important to understand that ‘posthumanism’ is not simply another way of talking about cyborgs or other fantasies of human enhancement - it has a philosophical and critical inheritance which is far more to do with the question of how we define and value what it means to be human. In this sense, it is much more theoretically rich than the ‘transhumanism’ with which it is sometimes confused.
Perspectives on education
Kolowich, S (2010) The Human Element. Inside Higher Ed http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/29/lms
Monke, L (2004) The Human Touch, EducationNext http://educationnext.org/thehumantouch/
Monke’s article is a plea for a re-thinking of education policy prioritising technological ‘literacy’ in schools from the earliest years of education.
This article attempts to make a case for the inclusion of more video and audio in online teaching, in order to increase the sense of presence and ‘human-touch’ for distance learners.
Looking to the future
These are two video advertisements - one from Corning, and one from Microsoft - setting out these companies’ visions of how their products will evolve and be used in the future. In both cases, the companies position their information technologies as completely integrated with daily life.
Sight explores how the ubiquity of data and the increasingly blurry line between the digital and the material might play out in the sphere of human relationships. The focus on the emerging social and educational use of game-based ‘badging’ is particularly interesting.
Charlie 13 (14:20)
In this film, a young boy is about to reach the age where, in his society, he will be permanently ‘tagged’ by having a tracking device implanted in his body. A futuristic angle on a ‘coming of age’ story, the boy has to choose whether to submit to the requirements of his society, or seek a different life. By suggesting a degree of personal autonomy, the film diverges considerably from some of last week’s (new media, bendito machine III).
Sharing the broad theme of surveillance with the previous film, Plurality throws some time travel into the mix and asks us to imagine a future where the population is monitored through their DNA, and resistance takes the shape of attempting to ‘jam’ the surveillance systems by inserting multiple selves into the grid (those who are familiar with the concept of the panopticon will find the name of the system, and of one main character, amusing - and there is also reference to George Orwell’s 1984 in the name of the other main character). The grid can only function if absolute visibility of the movements and identities of the city’s inhabitants is maintained, and therefore practices of hacking become the ultimate threat.
Ideas and interpretation
Johnston, R (2009) Salvation or destruction: metaphors of the internet. First Monday, 14(4). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2370/2158
Bleecker, J. (2006). A manifesto for networked objects — Cohabiting with pigeons, arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14748019/Why-Things-Matter
This article looks ahead to the increasing potential for objects connected to the Internet, the so- called Internet of Things, to interact with each other and with humans by blogging (Bleecker calls these objects ‘blogjects’). The paper looks forward to a cacophony of inanimate objects murmuring in cyberspace or getting lost in their own private conversations. Bleecker stresses that it is the networked, communicative nature of Things that is important - what they say, and to whom - not their technical ability to store and transmit data:
The significance of the Internet of Things is not at all about instrumented machine-to-machine communication, or sensors that spew reams of data credit card transactions, or quantities of water flows, or records of how many vehicles passed a particular checkpoint along a highway. Those sensor-based things are lifeless, asocial recording instruments when placed alongside of the Blogject. (p.15)While Bleecker sees this future in largely utopian terms, you might consider it in light of this week’s films, and sketch out some of the ways that a future of blogjects might present some complex ethical and practical problems.
Perspectives on education
Shirky, C. (2012). Napster, Udacity and the academy. shirky.com, 12 November 2012. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the-academy/
Bady, A. (2012). Questioning Clay Shirky. Inside Higher Ed, 6 December 2012. http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/12/06/essay-critiques-ideas-clay-shirky-and-others-advocating-higher-ed-disruption
These two pieces fit together as an initial opinion piece (Shirky) and a critical response (Bady). Together, they provide a good overview of current debates about MOOCs, expressing hopes and fears about what a digital revolution in higher education might be like.
Shirky embraces the perspective that higher education is broken (expensive, limiting, elitist), and suggests that the MP3 (the most common file format for digital music) is a good metaphor for the MOOC. Telling a story of the music industry as surprised, then overcome by the emergence of the MP3, Shirky frames the narrative of higher education in similar terms, warning that institutions are not prepared for the revolution that MOOCs will bring. Dismissing one MOOC critic’s focus on quality, Shirky argues that openness will lead to improved quality: ‘open courses, even in their nascent state, will be able to raise quality and improve certification faster than traditional institutions can lower cost or increase enrollment’.
Bady (along with claiming that Shirky sets up his argument so that academics cannot respond without looking defensive) wonders whether the music metaphor, and Shirky’s emphasis on openness, obscure a massive, profit-driven business underpinning MOOC development. He argues that ‘open vs. closed is a useful conceptual distinction, but when it comes down to specific cases, these kinds of grand narratives can mislead us’. He asks, of Shirky’s claim that most higher education is expensive and mediocre, ‘would it be any less mediocre if it were free?’.
Audrey Watters’ Storify notes: http://storify.com/audreywatters/ecologies-of-yearning-and-the-future-of-open-educa
Richard Sebastian’s blog post: http://edtech.vccs.edu/openness-the-double-bind-and-ecologies-of-yearning/
And there’s more....
If you want to dig deeper into how the media is representing the emergence of MOOCs, and continue your hunt for metaphors, we recommend these two pieces. The comments on both are also worth exploring. What metaphors can you identify in these, and how are they operating to position MOOCs?
Anderson, N. (2012). Elite education for the masses. The Washington Post, 4 November 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/elite-education-for-the-masses/2012/11/03/c2ac8144-121b-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_story.html
Carr, N. (2012). The Crisis in Higher Education. MIT Technology Review, http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/429376/the-crisis-in-higher-education/
Looking to the past
This animated film tells the story of technological development in terms of ritual and worship - the characters in the film treat each new technology as god-like, appearing from the sky and causing the immediate substitution of the technology before it.
Inbox is a quirky representation of the ways in which web-based technology connects people, the limitations of those connections, and the nature of communication in a mediated world. Depending on how you interpret the relationship between the two main characters, and the ending, you might argue that this is a utopian account, or a dystopian one
Thursday depicts a tension between a natural world and a technological world, with humans caught between the two.
A very short, very grim representation of the effects of technology on humanity. There are definite visual echoes of “Bendito Machine III” here
Chandler, D. (2002). Technological determinism. Web essay, Media and Communications Studies, University of Aberystwyth. Download as PDF.
Dahlberg, L (2004). Internet Research Tracings: Towards Non-Reductionist Methodology. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 9/3. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue3/dahlberg.html
Perspectives on education
Daniel, J. (2002). Technology is the Answer: What was the Question? Speech from Higher Education in the Middle East and North Africa, Paris, Institut du Monde Arabe, 27-29 May 2002. http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-URL_ID=5909&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon, 9/5. http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf
Introduction
Mark Deuze (2006) draws from Baumann (1999) to define two aspects of culture - the history or heritage of a group, which shapes its members' lives and experiences, and the evolving performance of that heritage, which is never the same twice (p.73). Deuze suggests that digital culture shapes not only our online experiences and interactions, but also bleeds into offline life, because it so powerfully affects institutions, practices of information creation and sharing, and patterns of communication.
This definition deliberately doesn't distinguish between the concepts of 'high' and 'low' culture which suggest that there are judgements of quality to be made about how we 'perform' culture. Such debates about quality do inform quite a lot of conversation around the value (or otherwise) of the web though, and whether we are being enriched or impoverished by the mass participation and self publishing that is driving this particular moment in the history of digital culture.
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