Sometimes the lies within us are less frightening than the loneliness we might feel if we stop telling them”.
– Brock Clarke.The uncanny
The Uncanny (unheimliche; literally “unhomely” in german) is a Freudian concept where something can be familiar, yet at the same time alien, resulting in a sense of it being unnervingly strange.
we are presented with the interesting notion of the learner as a cyborg - an argument which although provocative does remind us that cyberspace affects not only pedagogy per se but the identity of learners too and with that changes in perceptions of what learning is. It’s not then simply a matter of performativity, of increasing transactive efficiency, but also of a change in culture.
– Robin Usher Lost and found: ‘cyberspace’ and the (dis)location of teaching, learning and research 1998 pg 4education as a modernist institution is characterised by the ‘spaces of enclosure’ of the book, the classroom and the curriculum - spaces which work to enclose meaning. The learner’s task is then one of extracting a singular canonical meaning and the teacher’s that of being the ‘authority’ in terms of interpretation and accuracy.
– Robin Usher Lost and found: ‘cyberspace’ and the (dis)location of teaching, learning and research 1998 pg 3Featherstone and Burrows (1995: 5) define cyberspace as - ‘a cluster of different technologies, some familiar, some being developed and some still fictional, all of which have in common the ability to simulate environments within which humans can interact’. It is both a space and a non-space; a (dis)location - something that is both positioned and not positioned, (dis)placed but not re-placed, a diaspora space of hybridity and flows where one and many locations are simultaneously possible.
– Robin Usher Lost and found: ‘cyberspace’ and the (dis)location of teaching, learning and research 1998 pg 2
