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Date:         Thu, 12 Nov 1992 18:58:11 +1100
              <EDPOLYAN@ASUACAD.BITNET>
From:         Chris.Bigum@DEAKIN.OZ.AU
Subject:      An Invitation to participate in an Electronic Salon:
              Re-Articulating Education & the New Information Technologies

An Electronic Salon concerned with the re-articulation of Education and the
New Information Technologies will be conducted from 15th - 28th of November.
The E-Salon will form a part of a symposium at the forthcoming joint 1992
AARE/NZARE (Australian and New Zealand Associations for Research in Education)
Conference to be held at Deakin University from November 22nd to 26th.

Participation:
--------------

The Salon will operate using listserver software and so you can sign on and
off the list to suit. You join the E-Salon by signing onto a list called
ITED-L@deakin.OZ.AU. The list will not continue beyond the 28th of November.

How to join the list:
---------------------

To this address: listserv@deakin.OZ.AU
Send the following line on the first line of the message:

subscribe ITED-L Mary Rainbow

(where Mary Rainbow is your name)

Further information about how to retrieve papers and general information about
the E-Salon will be sent to you once you have signed on.


How to remove your email address from the list:
-----------------------------------------------

To this address: listserv@deakin.OZ.AU
Send the following line on the first line of the message:

unsubscribe ITED-L

Papers:
-------
There are a number of papers that will serve as a basis for discussion in the
E-Salon. They will be available via anonymous ftp. We hope to have a facility
in place whereby papers can be retrieved by email as well.

Face-to-face symposium:
-----------------------

The E-salon will run prior to and during a face-to-face symposium to be held
at Deakin in late November. We will attempt to integrate the deliberations of
both the virtual debates and the face-to-face ones as best we can.

The terrain of the E-Salon:
---------------------------

*Classical* educational readings of the [role/place] of the new information
technologies in education see education largely as a space into which such
technologies are inserted in order to support and perhaps extend existing
educational practices and curriculum. In the E-Salon, we want to explore the
consequences of re-articulating educational practice to the new information
technologies by replacing the means-ends logic that has dominated educational
discourses about IT to date. In particular, we are interested in drawing upon
*a wide range of discourses* to explore ideas around themes/questions like
these:

1. What new kinds of postmodern student-subjects now inhabit formal schooling
sites? How are they positioned in the larger educational and cultural contexts
which exist outside formal schooling systems, in particular the mass
electronic media as a 'critical socialising context', which Hinkson (1991)
argues has been centrally implicated in the (re)generation of student
identities and cultural forms?

2. In a more speculative sense, drawing upon the work of Katherine Hayles,
Donna Haraway, Paul Virilio, among others, we are interested in exploring the
notion of a *cyborg curriculum*.

3. Strange (1986) has written of the IT-induced *decoupling* of employment
from economic activity. Other commentators have begun to describe *virtual*
forms of what have been, till recently, material froms of schooling. We are
interested in what appears to be a similar, IT-induced *decoupling* of
schooling and curriculum, and consequently the need to reconceptualize both
'curriculum' and 'schooling' in and for postmodern/virtual conditions. A
priority is the assessment of the increasingly significant nexus between media
culture and postmodern schooling, along with a consideration of the moves
towards computerization and technologization of the curriculum as are already
apparent in our schools and in current educational policy.

4. And to quote the last paragraph of a forthcoming paper:

>>Aliens in science fiction are creatures from other worlds. In our current
and emergent digital ecology, there are many such worlds that are seemingly
'off-limits' to older cyborgs but within which younger cyborgs are busy, even
now, shaping and making their identities. Schools might well become unique
sites, then, as 'worlds' in themselves where generationally different cyborgs
meet and exchange accounts of their travels in techno-realityPPprovided we let
go and allow ourselves to re-imagine and re-construct them along such lines,
in negotiation with those who one day will take our place.<<

In a similar sense, the articulation of the face-to-face Symposium and the
E-Salon provide a space for the exchange of 'stories' where discursively
different cyborgs can meet and exchange their accounts of techno-reality.

If you have interests in this general terrain then we invite your
participation in the E-Salon.

Chris Bigum & Bill Green,
Centre for Studies in Information Technologies & Education
Deakin University
Geelong
Victoria 3217
Australia
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