Uncanny digital literacies

Uncanny digital literacies

The uncanny

An uncanny digital pedagogy

Some questions for literacy

The uncanny is ‘a crisis of the natural, touching upon everything that one might have thought was “part of nature”: one’s own nature, human nature, the nature of reality and the world’

(Royle 2003).

It is the familiar being rendered unfamiliar, a blurring of the boundary between the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead, the embodied and the disembodied, the present and the past or absent.

One of the effects of haunting will be to destabilize the traditional modern site of teaching, the classroom, and its place in the so-called system of the university. (Kocchar-Lindgren 2009)

phantomenology

hauntology

ghostliness

disquietude

temporality

disorientation

ontology

strangeness

anxiety

troublesomeness

liminality

thresholds

embodiment

ontology

The student is perforce required to venture into new places, strange places, anxiety-provoking places. This is part of the point of higher education. (Barnett 2007)

intellectual uncertainty

‘intellectual uncertainty’ is in part what Freud’s essay has to teach and, indeed, that this is a crucial dimension of any teaching worthy of the name. (Royle 2003)

‘the uncertainty principle reaches deeply into the student’s being’ (Barnett 2007)

generative uncertainties online

An 'uncanny' digital pedagogy:

presence

time

body and text

will Sian and Jen pull it off or will it end in tears? @digitalanthony

distance mode: hovering between presence and absence

‘ghosts, as liminal figures of repetition … break open the old structures that wish to reproduce themselves, disturb the “traditional” epistemological and pedagogical order of the university’ (Kocchar-Lindgren 2009)

embodied absences and disembodied presences

‘The conventional teacher-led practices of classroom teaching are not instantly remade in the image of new forms of social networking, despite the claims of their most enthusiastic innovators, but instead they reshape the digital practices to serve their own, far more deep-rooted social purposes.’ (Goodfellow and Lea 2007)

http://digitalculture-ed.net/

time

is out of joint

hauntology: ‘a general temporality made up of the successive linking of presents identical to themselves’ (Derrida 1994)

temporal dimensions of literacy

Take a look at the archive of our #mscdystopia twittorial. The chronological order does not necessarily guarantee a linear reading sequence. In this respect…a twittorial archive shares quite a few common properties with an image. @vbabouris

body and text

'selfhood...duplicated, divided and interchanged' (Freud 1919)

‘The virtual realm shifts the register of the self’s relation to itself. In cyberspace a practice emerges of continual self-definition. Ethics recedes into ontology.’ (Poster 2006)

‘The Internet is not simply a virtual space in which human actors can be observed: it is a medium through which a wide variety of statements are produced.’ (Bassett and O’Riordan 2001)

lifestreaming at: http://digitalculture-ed.net/

questions

agency: a 'site of practice' or a volatile text?

critique of, or appropriation by, 'established institutional processes' (Goodfellow and Lea 2007)

the ethics of 'bringing chaos to the souls of those online' (Poster 2007)?

presence

Sian Bayne

University of Edinburgh

The uncanny

studying without a VLE feels like tightrope walking without a safety net. @sezpayne2