Abstracts
Lisa Gye – Halflives,
A Mystory: Writing Hypertext to Learn
This paper outlines an approach to online learning that focuses
on the online writing environment as an apparatus of electracy rather
than as a medium for the delivery of course materials via online
learning systems. Using the Halflives web project as a case study,
I argue that taking Ulmer's approach to mystoriographical learning
can change the ways in which we think about learning and teaching
both off and online.
Karen Woo – Learning
Through New Media Objects
This paper compares learning objects with Manovich's new media
objects. It shows that learning objects are culturally translated
from programming objects through the use of new media in education.
Some characteristics of programming objects simply do not apply
to learning objects. On this basis, it argues that the grandest
promises for learning objects – reuse – fails both in programming
objects and in learning objects. Then it discusses some common issues
that faced by new media producers and learning object producers.
It separates out the issues that belong to the medium from those
belonging to management and education, and points to a team-based
approach to learning object production with experts in the medium,
management and education.
Tama Leaver –
WebCT: Will the Future of Online Education be User-friendly?
In 2004, the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at
the University of Western Australia will cease using The Forum,
an in-house developed online education delivery system, and will
shift to the popular corporate American online courseware package,
or Managed Learning Environment, WebCT (Web Course Tools). The process
of migrating to a new online education environment is an ideal moment
to ask some important questions about WebCT and the implications
this delivery platform holds for online education in a more general
sense. I stress that this paper is not intended as an exhaustive
critique or how-to guide for WebCT course creation. Rather, this
paper narrates the two levels of engagement I have experienced thus
far with WebCT. Firstly, I describe my initial reactions to the
WebCT suite itself as it is set up at the University of Western
Australia. This engagement includes concerns about both the structure
of the program, and the underlying architecture of student and teacher
interaction. Secondly, I analyse WebCT as a corporate entity and
discuss issues raised from a close reading of elements of the WebCT
homepage, the marketing strategy, and the directions WebCT as courseware
package is heading according to their "white paper" on
future developments. In the course of this analysis, I offer a framework
to consider whether WebCT is an ideal technological partner in the
teaching process, or whether it unavoidably closes avenues of learning.
Philip Roe – That-which-new
media studies-will-become
This paper engages with the question of how new media can be thought
as "new" when new media are nothing new. Through the concepts of
virtuality (Deleuze), spectrality (Derrida) and projection (Heidegger),
the paper offers offers some ways to think this question. The instance
of photography is used to demonstrate the central thesis of the
paper: that a new medium is always in advance of itself – the emergence
of particular technologies is always a result of discursive desires
manifesting within culture prior to the technologies themselves.
The paper proposes that we can approach the emergence of new media
(technologies) in the same way, and offers the hologram as an instance
that is attempting to manifest a post-print textuality – a culture
of writing-to-come. It proposes that new media studies must think
this virtual time in order to engage with the question of the "new"
of new media as a productive engagement with culture and new media
technologies.
Esther Milne – Email
& Epistolary Technologies: Presence, Intimacy, Disembodiment
A key problem for critical media practice is how to
assess accurately the technological impact, historical significance
and cultural consequences of a particular change in a communications
system. Contemporary theorising about the impact of electronic,
digitally networked culture is often articulated within an eschatological
narrative of apocalypse and last things. The old is cast as naive
and redundant while the new appears triumphant, conquering and redemptive.
Washing away the sins of the old, the new technology arrives, it
seems, out of nowhere. In response to such socio-technological representations,
this paper argues that the dialectic between old and new communication
systems is more complex than has been assumed by contemporary media
theory. Rather than a narrative of radical changes, decisive shifts
and abrupt breaks, the relation between epistolary and email technology
reveals certain continuities. Specifically, tropes of presence and
intimacy are traced through three media sites: a "virtual community"
of British nineteenth-century letter writers, the postcard correspondence
of an Australian First World War soldier and a twenty first century
email discussion list. Mapping these sites reveals a central paradox
of technological and discursive cultural practice, namely, that
material signifiers can be used to produce incorporeal presence.
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