Ipseity

Presentation at the Microlearning Conference in Innsbruck, Austria. Here’s the abstract; here’s the PowerPoint:

In this presentation, Norm Friesen draws from his years of experience with learning objects and technical e-learning standards to explore how microcontent and microlearning can be most effectively conceptualized. The term “learning object” has long been criticized for its ambiguity: Since there is no entity or object that cannot, in theory, be used in learning, the learning object paradigm ends up applying to both everything and therefore also to nothing. Something similar holds for many technical standards intended to support learning: Practices and contents associated with learning are so protean and ubiquitous that any standard or data model that would claim to support learning tout court falls into the same contradiction: it applies to everything and nothing. We are left, in effect, asking: “Where’s the learning in learning objects and standards?” In this presentation, Norm will advocate looking towards existing practices and prevalent “genres” of information in education to understand how we’re already using microcontent –and how we can use it more effectively. Looking at citation, messages in online communication, and other examples, Norm will show how these are exemplary instances of “microcontent,” providing ready-made metadata (e.g. author, title, date), and developing out of familiar precedents in earlier information practices (citation indexing, letter-writing etc.). Similarly, the educational value of other forms of microcontent can be readily articulated when this content is understood in specific ways and within particular educational contexts and precedents.

A draft paper, written with Grace Chung and Andrew Feenberg. Here’s a draft; here’s the abstract:

The near-ubiquity of surveillance and dataveillance technologies in public and other spaces (public squares, transit stations, supermarkets, bank lobbies) has recently given rise to doubts about the totalizing, panoptic discipline and control frequently ascribed to these technologies. If these pervasive technologies are as “panoptic” as the theories derived from Foucault’s classic work suggest, would this not render everyday life as totally controlled as the cells in Bentham’s prison? In the wake of this and other kinds of questioning of the Foucauldian approach, new ways of conceptualizing both surveillance and the observed subject are coming to light. This paper takes this post-panoptic questioning further by utilizing phenomenological and ethnomethodological methods to study the everyday experiential reality of surveillance and dataveillence –methodologies that are little utilized in surveillance studies. This new approach addresses the similarly under-theorized questions of individual experience of surveillance. Perhaps surprisingly, such a study appears to reinforce Foucault’s original panoptic articulation much more directly than do more recent models and conceptions of surveillant regimes. But at the same time, this study raises new questions regarding the role of the body and attention in surveillance and dataveillance –and in resistance to these technologies and practices.