King Ludd: Ulmer Statement

Q: Pedagogy "cyberspatial"? VR help reconceive the University?

A:

  1. terms such as "VR", "cyberspace" etc are placeholders, perhaps catachreses, to name a support for language, memory, + that is emerging in our technology.

  2. Grammatology (the history and theory of writing) is the frame I use to speculate on what is happening around these technologies.

  3. In grammatological terms, everything having to do with school practices and discipline knowledge as institutions is a feature of literacy, of the literate apparatus.

  4. an "apparatus" includes not only the technology but also institutionalized practices and individual subject formation (it is a social machine).

  5. Computeracy (electeracy, byteracy) is being invented within the apparatus of literacy (just as writing was invented within orality) but will evolve into its own apparatus.

  6. Critical thinking, casting thought into the structure of problem and solution, reasoning the form of argumentation--all these are literate practices, developed within school as an institutionalization of writing. Critical thinking is to byteracy what memory theaters were to the scientific treatise.

  7. Critical method still has a major role to play in the invention and design of the practices of learning (and the apparatus of byteracy as a whole) relevant to "cyberspace."

    8. The 7 points above are not axioms but points of departure for further discussion.

    Greg Ulmer

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