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Course reflection with a musical accompaniment

I would like to begin my reflection on the IDEL course with a song: ‘Living in Another World’ by Talk Talk. I’ve listened to it multiple times since the death of lead singer and songwriter extraordinaire Mark Hollis in February and it has taken on personal significance which is interwoven with my experience of IDEL. Musician King Creosote is reported to have said that the song sounds like a musical version of Escher’s ‘Relativity’, and according to Hollis himself, the lyrics were inspired by the work of Jean-Paul Sartre (Wikipedia, 2019). Interesting and potentially useful pub quiz knowledge as this may be, what is its relevance to IDEL?

While ostensibly the song recounts a tale of romantic alienation and breakdown, it could also allude to a more generalised sense of existential alienation from others, of living a parallel but unique and at times conflictual and confusing existence. Try as you might to fully understand the world from another person’s perspective, the result has the potential to be frustrating and perplexing. “Help me find a way from this maze. I’m living in another world to you”. Although I wouldn’t say I have exactly suffered from existential alienation during the IDEL course, at times I’ve felt a hint of uneasiness and disconnect from my course colleagues and tutors, most likely triggered or compounded by the absence of face-to-face physical interaction. Rather than progressing through the course in unison, we’ve each had to take an independent route via a different staircase with a separate source of gravity, at times coinciding in the same virtual space but often with an acute awareness of our own subjectivity. I’ve had instances of worrying that my approach to the course, my motivations, my mindset, my interpretations, my realisations and doubts might be misaligned with those of other students in a way which renders them somehow inappropriate or inadequate. “Did I see tenderness where you saw Hell? God only knows what kind of tale you’d tell”. And it obviously hasn’t been possible to easily offset this with a quick reassuring chat over a cuppa.

But doom, gloom and unease is by no means the tone I want to set in this post; quite the contrary! I do think it is important to acknowledge that studying online can be accompanied by sensations of isolation, insecurity and confusion but in my case these have been fleeting and surmountable. In an attempt to tap into Mark Hollis’ subjectivity and relate all this to Sartre’s ideas, there are inevitably moments in life when our existence appears to confound all logic and is apparently ‘stripped of any of the prejudices and stabilising assumptions lent to us by our day-to-day routines (The School of Life, 2014)’; moments of emotional unrest or intellectual upheaval, for example. Fortunately, although moments like these may be disorientating and anxiety-inducing, they can also be liberating and lead to new possibilities by helping us to view things from a fresh perspective. One IDEL-related example of this might be opening up the black box of technology, stripping it of the causal logic with which it is assumed to operate on and in the world, and beginning to see it differently and ask new questions of it. So ultimately I suppose we can seek solace in the idea that with uncertainty and bafflement come opportunities for discovery! Speaking of which, what I initially had in mind for this post was to reassess the goals and expectations I held at the beginning of the module in light of all that I have learned and experienced.

I thought it would be interesting to revisit some of the comments I made in the early stages of the course as a way of visualising how my goals, expectations and perspectives have evolved in the past twelve weeks. Starting with my first blog post during Orientation Week: “my greatest hope in doing this course is to gain a deep enough insight in the fascinatingly vast field of digital education to give me fresh professional avenues to explore”. Well I can say with unreserved certainty that this particular journey is well underway! The process of researching my final assignment and confronting the question of who benefits from digital education led me to a specific avenue I hadn’t previously traversed: basic digital literacy skills development as an intervention to mitigate against social and digital exclusion. My research introduced me to a number of organisations which seem to be making significant strides in this area, including Online Centres Network in the UK, and this discovery marked one of my motivational highlights of the course. Also in my first post, I expressed “my strong conviction that digital education has the potential to boost people’s life chances in ways which were not previously possible. And it is in this trajectory for positive change that I would like to ultimately position myself”. Twelve weeks later, while I have developed a more critical wariness of idealistic notions of technologically-enabled emancipation, my fundamental desire to work in pursuit of social justice remains steadfast.

Fast forward to the forum for introductions in Week 1, where I attempt to explain my expectations for the course: “while on first consideration the field of educational technology might appear relatively simple to define, the deeper I delve the more complex it seems to become. So I suppose what I want to do during this course is grapple with that complexity, develop a clearer sense of the scope of possibility afforded by technology to transform traditional modes of teaching and learning, and identify areas in which I may wish to specialise in my academic research and professional practice”. Well there’s certainly been a fair amount of grappling going on over the past three months and in that time I’ve had cause to consider not only the transformative and disruptive aspects of digital education but also the continued relevance and value of non-digital modes and methods; not to mention human teachers! I’ve also come to understand that to be a competent digital education practitioner is a demanding undertaking which requires criticality, tenacity and creativity in order to resist enticingly neat but ultimately limiting perspectives which tend towards either a rejection or embrace of technology. Instead of being black-boxed and perceived to be acting on the world or being acted upon in a predetermined or calculated way, technology is better understood as one of many nodes in a complex network of actors, interacting with other actors in manifold ways with sometimes unanticipated or unintended results, not least in education.

Overall, I have been deeply engaged and immeasurably impacted by all that I have learnt and experienced during IDEL and I’m greatly looking forward to continued grappling and intellectual upheaval in the next module! As regards ideas for research and professional specialisms, I’ve already mentioned digital literacy as an emerging area of interest and intend to briefly outline this alongside some other ideas in a separate post.

All that remains is to say thank you very much for taking the time to read my posts and for your encouraging, constructive and insightful comments throughout the semester. I’m eternally indebted!

 

The School of Life (2014) ‘Philosophy – Sartre’. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bQsZxDQgzU

Wikipedia (2019) ‘Living in Another World’. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_in_Another_World

 

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