Real time pedagogies: a cultural symptomology
| Type of publication: | Misc |
| Citation: | 392 |
| Year: | 2005 |
| Month: | 2 |
| Note: | Hides 23-25 February 2005 - Real time pedagogies js, 27.05.2007 |
| URL: | http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/ice2... |
| Abstract: | Shaun Hides Coventry University, UK Real time pedagogies: a cultural symptomology The orthodoxy of Postmodern times is that, following the triumph of Liberal-Democracy/free-market capitalism over competing politico-cultural system(s), we live beyond political ideologies. Our cultural loss of faith in meta-narratives and the 'death of the author', simultaneously undercut both the grounds for the evaluation of cultural artefacts and for traditional (ideological) analyses of the 'politics' of culture. We also now teach within socio-cultural environments in which individual and collective identity, ('position') are more fore-grounded than ever before. This paper examines questions of the operation and interplay of power, identity and culture within one example of Online learning in HE. Specifically these broad issues are examined in the context of teaching highly diverse cohorts of students on a Masters course at Coventry University. although much of the institutional, cultural, political and ethical framework that gave such claims their value appears to be dissociating. The internet is evidently a key location in which these issues of the status of knowledge, and related ones of control, are currently being played out. Currently 'eLearning' is proffered as the 'future' of Higher Education, but the proliferation of web-based learning merely re-inscribes the questions of the status of knowledge and its relation to power within new techno-cultural forms. The network of factors and effects articulated within online learning coalesce in provocative and revealing ways around the particular experiences of international students. These students embody and raise directly the processes of economic and cultural globalisation, these in turn highlight issues of divergent cultural/'educational traditions and the arbitrary operations of authority that hold them in place. The response advocated in this paper is to engage with the cultural difference implicit in the exchanges between a UK university course (its staff team, its practices and its 'content') and students who carry with them ethics, values and practices which are to some degree at odds with those of the institution. The difference of these students can be understood as a point of mutual critical engagement rather than as a deficit. Such an engagement with 'cultural difference' would also problematise much of the current conception and role of online learning. Rather than accelerating the end of ideology (de-centring power) and enabling interactivity (choice, individuation and accessibility), much online-/e-Learning can best be understood as an expression of a pervasive (post)ideology: what Mark Poster has called "informationalisation". Under this logic, precisely those 'cultural' engagements, resistances, difficulties and mistakes which are central to learning, are subsumed. Knowledge (as distinct from information) seen as a set of conceptual objects, intellectual processes and relationships that are simultaneously social, discursive and embedded in power, is challenged by the post-ideology of much e-Learning software, which privileges instantaneity, efficiency, and performativity. International students' engagement with our developing modes of teaching reveals more than the cliché that they are more likely than others to use the internet to plagiarise, they also enable us to critique the notion of "friction-free" leaning. References Appadurai, A. (1990) 'Disjuncture and difference in the Global Cultural Economy'Public Culture 2(2): 1-24 Gates, B. (1996) The Road Ahead, Harmondsworth: Penguin Hassan R (2001) 'Net results: knowledge, information and learning on the Internet' Journal of Educational Enquiry, Vol. 2, No. 2, 44 Poster, M. (1996) 'Cyberdemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere.' In David Porter, ed., Internet Culture, pp. 201-217. London: Routledge, Purser, R. E. (2000) The Coming Crisis in Real-Time Environments: A Dromological Analysis Accessed: 01.09.02 Robins, K. and Webster, F. (eds.) (2002) The virtual university? :knowledge, markets, and management, Oxford : Oxford University Press. Virilio, Paul (2000) Information Bomb (trans. Chris Turner), London: Verso. Zizek, S. (1997) The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso |
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| Added by: | [ADM] |
| Total mark: | 0 |
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