Monday 21 June 2010

E-learning and Death

As with all human agency, e-learning contributes to a technological lifeworld which continues beyond any individual life. It's causal in the development of new younger lives and transformative of social structures and communications which form the context for lives to come. Universities have played a key role in safeguarding the agency of learning of past generations; the living go there to consort with the dead, and in so doing, keep the agency of the dead alive. Technology will in time assume this role too. The preservation of agency of the dead in technological forms will, I have little doubt, be utterly transformative for future generations in ways which we cannot yet imagine. The metaphysical mysteries of all this are of course not mentioned in any learning theory I know of!

This is a ghostly improvisation. Since I've been looking at 'ecological' approaches to memory and perception, I've become interested in how this might translate to a cybernetic understanding of spiritual phenomena. It's all very weird, but equally fascinating, and I think probably not entirely stupid.

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