Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Thursday, February 21, 2013
MOOC: e-Learning and Digital Cultures Week 4 #EDCMOOC
Steve Fuller's TEDxWarwick talk: Humanitiy 2.0 (http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/podcasts/media/more/tedx?podcastItem=steve_fuller.mp4)
was a resource offered at part of Week 3's reading/viewing/s and was accompanied by some thought/discussion questions. Including this one:
In claiming that ‘the old humanistic project should not be dropped’, Professor Fuller links his talk to our key theme of re-asserting the human. His stance seems to be that ‘you can only be morally credible’ if you are addressing issues of human freedom and equality. Thinking about education specifically, might we see MOOCs as an example of an ‘old humanistic project’, particularly in the promise they appear to offer for democratisation, equality of access and so on?"
My first reaction to the last sentence is that it reflects an anti-democratic view of what happens in a MOOC or in many other types of educational format: It's not that the "humanist" completes a project by providing access to the "other." Instead, it's the "others" who, by encountering one another, realize the humanist project of meaning-making.
One of the aspects of this unit I have found problematic is that it doesn't really seem to identify and examine the fundamental fear of death that is behind all of these trans-humanist fantasies. While humanism does seem to recognize that the biological, social, and cultural activity engaged in by human beings persists beyond the death of a particular individual, trans-humanist desires arise from the ultimate importance of the persistence of the individual. Each individual's biological imperative is to persist; the discrete biological and/or cognitive processes that comprise "me" must go on. Imagining consciousness transferred without modification into some other, non-physical state, as does True Skin, is an individualist's fantasy rooted in the survival instinct.
was a resource offered at part of Week 3's reading/viewing/s and was accompanied by some thought/discussion questions. Including this one:
In claiming that ‘the old humanistic project should not be dropped’, Professor Fuller links his talk to our key theme of re-asserting the human. His stance seems to be that ‘you can only be morally credible’ if you are addressing issues of human freedom and equality. Thinking about education specifically, might we see MOOCs as an example of an ‘old humanistic project’, particularly in the promise they appear to offer for democratisation, equality of access and so on?"
My first reaction to the last sentence is that it reflects an anti-democratic view of what happens in a MOOC or in many other types of educational format: It's not that the "humanist" completes a project by providing access to the "other." Instead, it's the "others" who, by encountering one another, realize the humanist project of meaning-making.
One of the aspects of this unit I have found problematic is that it doesn't really seem to identify and examine the fundamental fear of death that is behind all of these trans-humanist fantasies. While humanism does seem to recognize that the biological, social, and cultural activity engaged in by human beings persists beyond the death of a particular individual, trans-humanist desires arise from the ultimate importance of the persistence of the individual. Each individual's biological imperative is to persist; the discrete biological and/or cognitive processes that comprise "me" must go on. Imagining consciousness transferred without modification into some other, non-physical state, as does True Skin, is an individualist's fantasy rooted in the survival instinct.
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