The difference between human and posthuman learning
Professor Cathrine Hasse, University of Aarhus, Denmark
24 June 2016, 12-2pm
Paterson’s Land G21, School of Education, Holyrood Road, The University of Edinburgh [new venue]
Sign up here open to all: please bring your lunch.
In this talk I shall discuss technological mediation and how it transforms two entangled conditions of learning – how and what we learn. Humans learn when they engage their bodies in learning with their environments. This learning process can be viewed as a cultural learning process where we learn to live and dwell in different cultural ecologies. The process has always involved the development of tools and that human adults pass on their own learning to subsequent generations. What we learn about is affecting how we learn and is also increasingly technology mediated. New technologies mediate new experiences of our environments.
As we learn to use new technologies created outside our own environments what we mean by learning is changing. When learning become increasingly technological mediated, humans and their conditions for learning are also transformed. Former learning theories were adjusted to specific conceptions of what a ‘human’ is. We now need new posthuman learning theories, which take account of these changing conditions for learning in and without educational environments. Learning is in itself a process of transformation. Underlining how technological mediation affects human learning processes is not a new dispute neither is the critical reflections on ‘the human’. ‘The human’ taken as point of departure in many former learning theories has already been severely criticized by new materialist theorizing. New materialist theories stress that technological mediation is profoundly changing the discourse of the ‘human’ or the ‘human experience’. A further step is to focus on how the transformed conditions of learning transform human collective capability of learning. With a theoretical perspective drawing on postphenomenology, anthropology and cultural-historical theory I shall argue that technological mediation with new electronic devices, dissolving time, place, and identity, create a profound difference in the conditions of learning calling for new theories of posthuman learning.
About the speaker: Cathrine Hasse is Professor in the School of Education at the University of Aarhus, where she leads the Program for Future Technology, Culture and Learning. Her most recent book is An Anthropology of Learning published by Springer Verlag in 2014.