#EDCMOOC Week 4: So what does 'learning' mean?

Hello again! I'm happy to announce that's only Wednesday and I've already been through all the contents of Week 4 :). It was a holiday today in Argentina and that helped a lot, but I also intended to read all texts and watch all videos early during the week, so I could devote the weekend to working on the final project.

I think I'll probably be doing a Prezi presentation. And I've already written down some ideas for it. I guess the question I'll be working with is Can education be enhanced by technology?, fosucing on what education is and what is not (which I'll start to discuss by the end of this post). I'm not trying to actually answer this, but to pose new questions and suggest some ideas, using different languages (pictures, text, videos). A little bit like the mural I prepared for Week 3.

As for week 4, it focuses on posthumanist and transhumanist theories. Transhumanism, unlike humanism and posthumanism, has been a new concept to me. As Hayes summarizes, transhumanism "...is an international movement dedicated to the proposition that contemporary technosciences can enhance human capabilities and ameliorate or eliminate such traditional verities as mortality. It holds that human evolution is incomplete and, moreover, that we have a responsibility to further our evolution through technology." It inmediately makes me think of sci-fi, and I guess it is inevitable. But actually us humans have enhanced our capabilities through technology in many simple ways. Just think about everyday devices such as glasses, or even writing --which, even when it doesn't seem so, is, as Ong suggests, a technology--.

To be honest, transhumanism ideals and objectives --or maybe the means they suggest to achieve them-- seem a little scary to me and I feel naturally inclined to reject them. But I do understand that they address some core fears of mankind: the fear of aging and death, mainly. And, in fact, as Hayles suggests, transhumanism is not really opposed to humanism, but based on some of its principles, such as rationality, scientific progress and individual freedom.

Now I completely agree with the idea that "human" is a social category, not only a biological or philosophical one. How we define as distinctly 'human' may change from one society to other, from a point in history to another one. And "education" is another social category. So, we might ask ourselves, what is education for a transhumanist point of view? It seems that, for a transhumanist, society can take control of technology and use it to enhance ourselves so as to learn more, or maybe better. But if that enhancement just means inserting microchips or USBs in our brains in order to copy into into large masses of information, or inserting some mega Google search engine in our heads, then I don't think learning means for them what it means for me. Learning is (not only) about adquiring lots and lots of information, but about analizing and criticising this information and turning it into knowledge. Learning is not about repeating what other say, but about discussing with others, exchinging ideas and points of view and transforming our life, society and reality through knowledge. While easy access to information might be helpful to learn more and better, it is not enough. And, though we can do many things to make it easier for learning to take place, we can't exactly control it.

We've been discussing the classroom metaphor for learning in the forums (and I've written about it in this blog). Classrooms aren't certainly the only places where we learn. Think about how much you've learned during your life outside a classroom or outside any educational institution. We learn by connecting with others, we might learn while watching a movie or reading a book, in a class at school or while taking a MOOC. It is not only about the content or the technology, but about how we conect and interact with that content.

These are the main conclusions or connections I am reaching after these 4 weeks. So that's what my artifact will be about... We'll see what I can come up with.