The Learning Screen

"Gregory Ulmer is Professor of English and Media Studies at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Professor of Electronic Languages and Cybermedia and Joseph Beuys Chair at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Networked art, new media innovations, and the Internet as a cultural phenomenon in general are manifestations of a civilizational shift in the apparatus (social machine) from literacy to electracy. The historical analogy (grammatology) with the previous (and still ongoing) shift from orality to literacy shows that the shift is gradual, with many transitional features, but ultimately produces a new dimension of experience in every area of the lifeworld (technology, institutions, individual and collective identity behavior). This essay addresses the situation of teaching electracy in a literate institution, describing a pedagogy for bootstrapping literate practices into an electrate skillset. What is the fundamental practice (logic, rhetoric, poetics) of thinking and communicating native to online learning?" -- From Turbulence