The Posthuman Condition

An interesting discussion came up with one of my Philosophy classes last week. By this, I don't mean to imply that an interesting discussion in this setting is a rarity, simply that the content of the discussion was about developing online teaching and learning resources. And yes, I did mean interesting!

Throughout the year I have used our Blackboard site in order to propagate copies of lecture notes, PowerPoint presentations and pdf versions of numerous things I legally should not be producing. Many students have found this very helpful, while others, as it emerged through conversation, saw this as a workable alternative to attending lessons. So, being a philosopher, I began to speculate as to what the future might hold for the classroom environment as the widespread use of e-learning and the complexity of available resources grows at an alarming rate.

I recalled an article that I read in The Economist very recently, entitled Nomads at Last. The article detailed the rise of wireless internet, and speculated (in short) that the widespread availability of information whilst on the move would have a number of effects for working life, the primary shift being one towards a nomadic culture wherein the traditional 'office' would be replaced with a series of gadgets that would allow the employee to work from any location, theoretically worldwide (although the article notes that travelling and the ability to travel do not necessarily coincide). The second shift was far more radical, perhaps suprising and a great deal more troublesome. This shift was towards social isolation.

Although the article, probably correctly, predicts that people in the future will be able to utilise this technology to work from home and thus spend more time with their family, it also hints towards the development of an insularity amongst family groups. With less need to leave the home, there will be fewer encounters with 'strangers' - the people next to us on the bus or train, the people you simply pass in the street and politely smile at or say 'hello' to. And this cultural shift is already noticeable around schools and colleges - young people I encounter every day seem to be socially isolating themselves, even within their peer groups. I am sure you have observed for yourself how young people who are together, whether it is in an elevator, or isat on the grass enjoying the sun, or walking down the street, each have their own i-Pod, playing their own playlist, and the shared experience is simply a one of physical, not intellectual, proximity.

Will this technological revolution claim as its victims the art of conversation and debate, the basics of social interaction, or the desire to share our interests with those we think of as friends? Perhaps this is being a little alarmist and reactionary, but we should not forget that in education we are hoping to shape the minds of the future, and these minds will become harder to shape if we cannot converse in a shared medium. If interactive conversation becomes alien, then what use will a classroom be?

So what will the future hold?

If the bleak picture above seems unlikely, then what exactly should we expect from e-Learning in the future? In a report by The e-Learning Guild published in April 2006, there had been respectively a 32% and 31% increase in Blogging and Podcasting in education on the previous year. That was two years ago, and while these technologies are not common-place for many teaching staff, they almost certainly will be with many younger staff whose involvement with social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace will have made these terms exceptionally familiar. The very fact that I am currently writing a blog, something which I have not done before today, and it is for the express purpose of being trained to teach, is indicative of just how important the people behind teacher education feel these technologies are.

In fact, in a 2008 report by the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, this suspicion is confirmed. The report details key emerging technologies which either are currently in use, or it is predicted will come into use in the near future. These include:

• Grassroots video - videos produced inexpensively by students and teachers to share information and ideas;
• Collaboration webs - an online shared resource area for teachers to upload resources and edit other people's work;
• Mobile broadband - access to broadband internet via mobile phones or PDA's;
• Data 'mash-ups' - databases which have been combined to form supra-interconnected databases of information;
• Collective intelligence - pieces of work which have been collaborated upon for student use, for example, Wikipedia;
• Social operating systems - such as the networking sites mentioned above.

These technologies all actively contribute to the social isolation of the individual: collaboration webs and social operating systems will remove the need for teachers to talk to one another in the staff room in order to share best practice. Students, similarly, will see changes to their social interaction - where once we 'called for' someone by knocking on their door, we later telephoned in advance; where once we telephoned, we later text messaged; where once we text-messaged, later we 'facebooked'. Each step becomes a little less personal (the latter being, in fact, extremely public).

There are unquestionable benefits to technologies such as podcasting - creating short revision videos is something I had hoped to do this year in order to help students revise on the move. But if we extend this technology to its limits, entire lessons can be delivered via podcast. Furthermore, as webcam and video conferencing technology develops, what is to say that there could not be interactive lessons delivered from the home of the teacher into the home of the student?

In the FE sector, this may be particularly appealing; colleges are funded per student enrolled and removing the physical limitations of a classroom will open up a potentially endless stream of funding for the most attractive colleges. Of course, by most attractive college, I don't mean in terms of the physical campus, but perhaps a virtual one, or more suitably, by those attaining the best results. What is certain is that making friends at such a college will be a vastly different experience from the one that you and I had.

Will the future blame us?

American poet Ogden Nash once quipped, "Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long."1 This is a sentiment I may have hinted at sharing over the course of this blog, but it is one which I feel I should clarify. If technology moves on, and people don't, historically this has only left people behind. The Luddites of the agricultural revolution in Britain became de facto terrorists, marginalised by a rapidly changing society. We should embrace technological change, but not neglect our duty to impart into learners the skills to cope with a variety of challenges. If social interaction gives way to isolation through technology, and we encourage or enable this, then we are not preparing young people for all of life's challenges. I would like to think that there will always be a place for face to face conversation, a place where mobile phones, PDA's, and i-Pods are put away for the preferred company of a close friend, for the preferred soundtrack of a real voice; I would like to think that place is the pub!



References

1. Ogden Nash. (2008, May 9). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16:12, May 18, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ogden_Nash&oldid=211338016

Recommended Reading

Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Phoenix Press, 1999.