Much of the beginning part of this week was spent wracking my brains and annoying my partner trying to come up with a suitably creative and exemplary way of summarizing all the aspects of our first three weeks of Education digital Cultures. The creative process can be hard to start and I think I speak for some of my fellow students in acknowledging that the task set for us required a fair amount of thinking. As stimulating and visually exciting our first topic has been its been a challenge to tie all the concepts presented in posthumanism, transhumanism and the lingua franca of technology enabled learning that is distorting the most beneficial aspects of our charge towards a new world of learning.
However the results have been outstanding and Im overawed by the talent that surrounds me. It really feels like we are developing in a true community of learning as we collectively become more adept and communicating and functioning in this ‘new’ medium. Its something I sure will grow as we become ever more mature online students and mirror the best traits of Salmons Five stages. In my experience this level of community of learning is rarely achieved, even where it is planned for. The ingenious design of the programmes designers must be lauded – thank you!
But this leads me to a question: How much of an influence does the culture of the participants on a programme such as ours play a part in creating successful collaborative learning experiences? To add further, to what degree do individual personalities have an effect on the success of digital learning? These and other questions will be good to explore in our next block as it provide a new angle from which to analyse a large scale learning exercise. I may go back and re-read some of IDELs week 6 prescribed readings on open education for this one…
Hello Myles, thanks for your weekly review.
‘However the results have been outstanding and Im overawed by the talent that surrounds me.’
Likewise. I’ve only glanced at the work – Jeremy and I will be commenting on them later in the week – however there’s some fantastic work in there (including your own). Having only glimpsed the work, I’m struck by how many of artefacts include content other than images as a seemingly vital meaning-making component, and in particular sound. I suppose this neatly picks up on the conversation we’ve had before where Sterne (2006) encourages us to look beyond the visual in our conceptualisation of cyberculture.
‘But this leads me to a question: How much of an influence does the culture of the participants on a programme such as ours play a part in creating successful collaborative learning experiences?’
I really like this. Your point acts as a very useful reminder that for all that we might get excited about the possibilities of digital technology around education, we need to see them as a part of wider social and cultural system, as Hand (2008) argues. And going from there to think about Bayne’s (2014) paper problematising framings around technology-enhanced learning, it reminds us the digital is more complex than tools or spaces to deliver teaching and learning outcomes, not least as the technologies are entangled with human interest – the community you mention.
As you suggest, this is a really nice bridge into week 4.