Digital artefact prepared as part of the MOOC course run by Edinburgh University

2. What have I learnt from E-Learning and
Digital Cultures?
If the slides are too slow,
click to the next slide

3.  How to be creative…
 Understand the differences between
utopia and dystopia
 Discover other social media to
express yourself
 Being philosophical again!

4.  Learning new ways to create artistic photos
 Joining in the discussions on Twitter feeds
 Finding out what is still out there
 Learning to overcome other tech boundaries

8. Utopian claims Dystopian claims
Information technologies based on
Information technologies possess
electronic computation possess
intrinsically de-democratizing properties
intrinsically democratizing properties
(the Internet and/or worldwide web is
(the Internet and/or worldwide web is
an autonomous formation with ‘in-
an autonomous formation with ‘in-
built’ anti-democratic properties or
built’ democratic properties or
dispositions).
dispositions).
Information technologies are
Information technologies are
intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend
intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend
themselves to control by de-
themselves to democratizing global forces
democratizing forces (hardware and
of information creation, transfer and
software ‘ownership’ equals anti-
dissemination.
democratic control).
Cyber-politics is essentially a pragmatic
Cyber-politics is essentially one of
or instrumental task of maximizing
resisting and perverting the anti-
public access to the hardware and
democratic effects of the technology in
software thought to exhaustively define
question.
the technology in question.

9. A Day made of Glass 2

12. Ideas and interpretations
Core
Johnston, R (2009) Salvation or destruction: metaphors of the internet. First Monday, 14(4).
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2370/2158
Johnston draws from the key work of Lakoff and Johnson to highlight the important work that
metaphors do in shaping our thinking. She identifies two broad categories of metaphors drawn
from the titles of editorials about the internet in late 2008 - those that take a utopian perspective
(salvation - transformative and revolutionary) and those that are dystopian (destruction -
attacking and supplanting). Last week we explored how to identify and consider determinist
positions about digital cultures and e-learning. Noticing the sorts of metaphors that are used to
draw comparisons between the unfamiliar and the familiar, or the abstract and the concrete, can be
another very useful way of understanding the assumptions that people are making about e-
learning (the ‘native’ and the ‘immigrant’, for example). In the next ‘perspectives’ section, we will
look at some MOOC-related articles, and this will be a great opportunity to do a bit of metaphor
analysis of your own. What examples of both ‘salvation’ and ‘destruction’ metaphors can you find in
these, or other MOOC reports and editorials? How does Shirky’s metaphor of the MP3, for
example, create a certain kind of story around the MOOC?

15. Transhumanism is very different from the more critical modes of posthumanism that were touched on
last week, in the Badmington article in particular. Where critical posthumanists see posthumanism
primarily as a philosophical stance which, among other things, draws attention to the inequalities
and injustices often wrought in the name of ‘the human’, transhumanists in general see ‘human
values’ as a good, though incomplete, project. For transhumanists, ‘humanity’ is a temporary, flawed
condition: the future of human evolution is in the direction of a post-human future state in which
technological progress has freed us from the inconveniences of limited lifespan, sickness, misery and
intellectual limitation. Transhumanism, in summary, is to a large extent based on the extension of the
humanistic principles of rationality, scientific progress and individual freedom that critical
posthumanists would question.
This article by Nick Bostrom (Oxford University) - whose work is at the more academically
respectable end of what can be a fairly uneven field - does a good job of summarising the
transhumanist position, though it’s important when reading this to understand that he does not use
the term ‘posthuman’ in the sense that, for example, Badmington does. What is your own response to
the ‘values’ he proposes? Do you find them attractive or repellent? On what basis? Bostrom mentions
education a few times here: what might his vision of transhumanism mean for the future of education?
What would a transhumanist theory of education look like?