Sian Bayne’s article [‘What’s the matter with ‘technology-enhanced learning’?’ Learning Media and Technology 40(1), pp.5-20] reads for me in ways she might well not expect. My context is theological education, the training of church ministers to think about the whole of life theologically. Specifically, I’m a biblical scholar and teacher and, as part of the whole-of-life remit for my students, I want to help them learn how to read and relate with technology theologically. A non-theological understanding of technology would be deficient for their learning contexts and training outcomes.
This leads me to read Bayne’s article through different eyes, and I want to unpack some initial thoughts here. I realise this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is very much my context, and I’m feeling my way into it. I’d value feedback on this from others, and these theologically-charged comments might well be a sustained way that I use to reflect on some of the set readings over the span of the course. Also, I’d like to feel towards the feasibility of a possible dissertation topic on this topic, and would value dialogue with that in mind, too.
Bayne says (p.7) “The language we use to define a field is always performative – it brings it into focus and into being in a particular way, and this focus of and mode of being is always ideologically inflected.” I very much agree, and this for me captures why I need to think about technology theologically in order to be able to teach about technology theologically.
Bayne (p.9), quoting Hamilton and Friesen (2013: 3) is concerned that we reach for “a fuller understanding of technologies as social objects.” Within a theologically-charged understanding of technologies, this moves beyond homo faber (bouncing here off Miller 2011, another set reading), into homo adorans, that is, that we become what we love, what we worship, that ‘things’ can make us, and we give our desires and allegiance to them.
Here, I think I’m reading Bayne at a slant, but a highly stimulating one for my context, and for developing a digital culture within it, appropriate to it. Bayne (p.9) reacts against “the alluring and efficient neatness of its [TEL’s] division of the social and the technological… the redaction of… complex entanglements” to either harnessing technology or it transforming education. I think a theologically-charged reading would do likewise. This also parallels Bayne (p.10), quoting Hamilton and Frisen (2013: 16) asks what about where technologies “fail in relation to our expectations of education.” Thinking about technology theologically, in sacral-social instantiations, will include this negative question too.
If I summarise and paraphrase Bayne, rather than quoting or citing her, I’m reading her world as a complex one, where humans are not at the centre, nor where they are separate from their surroundings, nor are they constituted apart from wider relations of varying kinds. The kind of world she is reacting against strikes me as being that of western secular modernism, an individualism bleached of anything beyond the secular. Certainly her quotation from Simon 2003: 3-4) on p.12 sets up her position against that of the Enlightenment. It’s not then that I’m arguing that her alternative is a biblical worldview – far from it – but I think her critique opens up suggestive possibilities for such a worldview (if that is something one wants to pursue – and I do).
Bayne (p.12) sees critical posthumanism as attempting to negotiate what Braun (2004: 1352) sees as a “devastating absence” are the core of previous Enlightenment project(ion)s of what it means to be human. In a future post, I’d like to explore a different navigation of this absence, wherein the ascended Jesus represents an alternative approach to reading both the human and technology. I’m not going to develop that here, but it spins off other work I’ve written on the ascended Jesus, using critical spatial theory. The transhumanist vision of how “to remove human limitations” (p.13) is not the only option for addressing such limitations. In short, if I can coin a term, an educative negotiation of technology (and the technological negotiation of education) in my theologically-charged context invites a christohumanism.
Like Bayne (p.14) this will not assume that enhancement is always a good. That would start to render it a god. That would be, along with Bayne, “both normative and highly problematic.”
A christohumanism will also need a wider ontological framing to locate it. Alongside Hayles (1999: 5), cited by Bayne (p.15), this too needs to “recognise human ‘finitude'”. It will do so within a created order where – with Bayne – the human is seen “neither as dominating technology nor as being dominated by it”, but where both the human and education are “being performed through a coming together of the human and non-human, the material and the discursive.”
The radical distinction is that I doubt Bayne ever anticipates a biblical ontology, with plenty of non-human subjects and agents: God, false gods, angels, principalities and powers, demons, spirits, heavenly creatures…. If such a world could be granted a moment of consideration, at least for my context, then it’s very different from the human-centred, humans-as-somehow-separate-from-their-context humanism that Bayne reacts against. I’m not painting this ontology in any detail here, but simply saying that my context requires it, and am asking whether educational studies would or could allow discursive space for it.
There’s a lot more I’d like to say and develop on this. A dissertation topic, perhaps. Perhaps, too, I need to develop some of the sketches in subsequent postings and comments. To that end, please react and respond, I’d be grateful to hear what others think.
Matthew, this is a fascinating post. Your background is leading you to have such an interesting perspective on the reading. I hadn’t picked up on the ‘finitude’ notion in Bayne’s argument, and it does suggest a different lens from how I’d been interpreting it, so thanks for writing this.
PS Former student of theology here 🙂
Thank you for the visit and the comment, Helen. Next week I hope to write a similar piece on Donna Haraway’s essay, which I found very confronting and suggestive, in equal parts. I’d love some interaction on it, in due course. Former students of theology are very welcome!
The facet of trans-humanism that addresses the removal of human limitations is certainly theological. Having been to seminary and spent my entire life as part of a church system, I am interested in how we encourage others to transcend human weakness and rely on God, or whatever pronoun suits you, to lift us into the realm of super-humans, capable of doing anything our hearts desire.
I personally believe that much of the teaching involving this transcendence of humans to a surreal world of bliss is a violation of the actual scriptural context, but I understand the psychology of our need to have an avenue of escape from the finite to the infinite. I also am a believer in the power of God in someone’s life that can be manifested in unexplained ways. And I fully understand the humanistic focus that such spiritual pathways do not exist outside of ourselves and our own human achievement.
In terms of technology, do you think we (humans) are using this technology much as the ancients did with the Tower of Babel? They strove to achieve immortality by reaching beyond themselves, using their own resources and cunning. And might we one day find ourselves in the same state as they, bereft of self-control and self-determination, at the mercy of the consequences of what we have created?
Philip, thank you for the visit and the reflection on my piece.
You mention transhumanism and the Tower of Babel. From my reading to date, I’m sensing Babel-like elements, but perhaps more regarding posthumanism.
For instance, when reading, I noted down Babel when I came across Haraway (2007: 44): “No objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in common language.”
And, similarly, p.45 (there are some italics in the original, not captured here): “Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move – the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment and exchange.”
Next week, I’m hoping to write a biblical response to Haraway’s essay, and this will be one part of a larger whole. I hope you’ll comment on it, in due course.
I read your post twice and skimmed it several times, went out for some fresh air, then came back to it with a cup of tea, before committing to this comment. I don’t have an existing field of studies to draw upon to make more sense of it than I do. I’m not a scholar by trade, but I embarked on this MSc to learn, and I am interested in what you write because I can feel it scratching away at my brain, even if it’s beyond my initial attempts to unlock its meaning or access the background it comes from.
“I want to help them learn how to read and relate with technology theologically” That quote defines a problem which I could with time, get my head around, and likely end up with a better understanding, as I’m sure your students will too. This course must be boon for you in that regard?! I hope that you get to pursue your area of interest through the programme and in to the dissertation.
From reading Silver (2006 p.1-2) I get a sense of how, like Internet Studies, Technology and Theology could pass through the four stages of development, if it hasn’t already. I googled “christohumanism” and see there’s a raft of information about it already. Is this something you have studied/taught previously? What stage is it at already? I’m sure there is a lot to gain for other elements of AI and robotics to understand more about what makes us human, from every perspective. Religion is bound up in the formation of ethics, culture and more in the UK, and even those who follow no religion would be naive to suggest they are free from influence of a church.
I have two ministers (Church of Scotland) in my immediate family, though I’m not following any religion myself. I see technology in the Church as having similar questions around as it does in Higher Education at a practical level at least. Churches have websites, use powerpoint HD projectors; use social media; hold conferences, workshops and of course services. HEIs do those things too albeit with lectures rather than services. Technology both informs the way things are taught and what is taught, and as is required for the development of technology, it is informed by educational practice. Both strive to answer questions about our existence, and both seem to have serious questions to answer about how to remain relevant in the face of unbridled neoliberal advances for politics and economic practice in many “democratic” countries at least.
My brother-in-law is massively technology adept. He has created online communities around his work in the Church; he has used technology to change the shape of his services and that has had impact on his father’s practice (who is also CoS minister). In turn, the Church is looking at ways that it can do with technology and how it fits in a world with technology (http://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/speak_out/science_and_technology).
But beyond that I look forward to reading more, least of all so I can enjoy some new areas of discussion beyond that of which I would get the chance to, outwith the occasions when I catch my family with a free moment to think on them.
(ref: Silver, D (2006) “Where is internet studies?” pp1-14 in Silver, David, Adrienne Massanari, and Steve Jones. Critical Cyberculture Studies, edited by David Silver, et al., NYU Press, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail.action?docID=865350.)
cmiller, thank you for some really helpful input here. I’m tracking three things in particular out of what you’re saying.
First, the need for clarity as to what I’m meaning. I’m in complete agreement with that. It’s a challenge to express a bigger discourse idea in a short(ish!) blog entry, and I appreciate you engaging with what I provided. I’ll keep working on the clarity as I post further. I’m especially keen not simply to talk to a narrow population of ‘insiders’, so to speak.
Second, I’m helped by your prodding at stages of development within the technology/theology interface. I’ve not really explored this, but want to. By previous training, I appreciate a genealogical approach to issues, and it would help here. Regarding ‘christohumanism’, I coined the phrase in the moment, and hadn’t googled it. I’ve done that since, especially together with ‘posthumanism’ to sift the results a bit, and some helpful stuff looks like it’s out there.
Third, I agree that many churches and ministers are using technology, even as adept with it. I’m keen to probe whether they’re thinking theologically about it. Thus, for instance, in my settings we often now project the hymns and songs we sing on to a screen, rather than reading from printed books. I’m interested in whether there is any shift in us theologically, fed by such a practice, e.g. a move away from consciousness of the overall ‘flow’ of say a hymn towards the ‘eternal present’ of what is before us on the screen. And does that matter – does it east away at, say, a big-picture sense of things more generally, thinking of Haraway’s dismissal of ‘salvation history’ in her 2007 piece from our set reading (pp. 35, 54). The technologies we use shape our practices, our loves, our imaginings, and I’m keen to explore those dimensions through a theological lens.
In sum, thank you for pushing me on these things, and I’ll try and follow on from them in further postings.