testing and not just for the sake of it #iAMb

— Cathy Hills (@fleurhills) February 3, 2017

Testing ifttt for my Week in iAMbs tweets.

I had an idea to summarise the week in iambic pentamaters, or at least one. Not exactly contemporary digital culture perhaps! It’s called #iAMb because the i confers a more up-to-date image it might otherwise not claim, in a corporate, Silicon Valley kind of way and co-constitutes the question-statement-proposition I AM. (Who we are as humans has been a theme of EDC so far.) The b is silent, it’s the parasitic worm code and/or the unrevealed element in the sociotechnical mix and/or power’s concealed cipher.

Warning – I’m no poet!

Testing and not just for the sake of it

This week’s iAMb hangs on the word testing. I’m thinking here of testing boundaries – the blurred boundaries we have been thinking of in the first EDC block, such as between the human and the machine, between education and learning or education and technology. Testing boundaries is what we are doing in this experimental learning space. Education and learning are all about testing, hypotheses and understandings, experiments and prototypes. Testing has connotations, too, of how education is a testing of ourselves, and perhaps necessarily so, to enable us to move forward.

Not just for the sake of it could mean that this testing is important, to me here, and to humans in general. We are testing the boundary of human technological perfectability and sinister outcomes of Artificial Intelligence. This testing matter is important and education is a means of giving voice to individuals to which this public learning space attests.

The predominance of monosyllables makes the sentence sound a bit robotic and the choice of and and not but after testing marks a pause, but less of one, to simulate the pace of life on the internet.

Of course, I was just really testing ifttt to see if it would work with another hashtag :).