Roundup from tutorial 1, 2021

by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

I thought I should freshen up the blog by writing a post from this year and I’ve chosen as my topic my own skewed interpretation of the conversation from the first tutorial of the course.

We began by discussing the oddness of the course in relation to others on the programme. This is a course in which the teachers do not know any of the answers, or even what the content of the course will be. The structure and content will be largely formed by the students and our conversations – the ideas you bring and the interaction between them. This is potentially exciting, and also necessary because of the vast and dynamic area of enquiry – the digital is an expanding topic and its boundaries are becoming ever blurrier.

Tonight, we considered whether online learning removes the learner from the focal space of the practices they are learning about and mused on what is often missing in digital forms of education – a theme I’m sure we will return to (spoiler: my take is that such a “removal” is not necessarily fundamental to digital activity, since the digital can be embedded within practice; rather, removal is a function of the material environment in which learning – digital or otherwise – takes place). We discussed the political and practical tensions between different stakeholders (e.g. IT, teachers, students) that can make it challenging for us to work with the technical infrastructures and environments we might choose for our educational activities. We considered how private companies can outpace public institutions in technological advances such that Pixar can have more sophisticated AI than medical research. We worried about whether the potential for distraction and looking things up might impair learning or lead to superficial forms of knowledge (spoiler: my take is… it’s complicated). We will return to all of these issues throughout the course, but for now I would love to read your comments below!

(by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash )