Editorial
Andrew Murphie
The second issue of the Fibreculture
Journal reflects on both new media in relation to their past,
and some attempts to adapt the past to contemporary technologies
in the new circuits of education. Of course, these two concerns
are closely related.
Education is very much trapped at the moment between present (technologically
informed) potential and past institutional formations. Despite all
the discussion about new pedagogies and the institutional love for
technological "solutions" such as WebCT, there still seems
a dire need for subtler theories of technology and education, more
informed critiques of current major moves in this direction, and
more supple, dynamic tools and concepts providing alternatives to
these major moves. Here we provide Lisa
Gye's discussion of her own experiment in pedagogy, Halflives:
A Mystory, which implements some of the valuable ideas of Gregory
Ulmer in an Australian context. Tama
Leaver gives a critique of WebCT as a seemingly closed system
at odds with the very idea of the network. Karen
Woo takes a look at learning objects, pointing out that
this potential foundation for distributed forms of education is
often misunderstood. She documents a number of interesting problems
for developers. All these articles are telling us how much further
we have to travel in order to really start mobilising the benefits
of networked media in education.
On the other hand, in two reflections on new media in relation
to the past, Philip Roe
and Esther Milne
are careful to sketch out the way that the past continues into the
future. The past is giving us much to build upon. Roe describes
the way in which, as was the case with "old new media"
such as photography, there is always a virtuality to new media which
potentialises the present with the fullness of the past, and drives
it into new becomings. Milne traces the continuities between letter
writing and email. For her, the complex creation of an incorporeality
of presence ghosts the strategies of both.
Andrew Murphie - Editor
web:http://mdcm.arts.unsw.edu.au/homepage/StaffPages/Murphie/
fax:612 93856812 tlf:612 93855548 email: a.murphie@unsw.edu.au
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