Technology, Information and Learning.

The context for learning, education and the arts has altered dramatically over the last few years, as has the cultural environment for educators and those involved in artistic and creative activities. A number of crucial developments have transformed the terrain of technology, education, art and culture, and these will have a profound effect not only on the social and political structure of advanced industrial societies, but on the ways in which we see ourselves, act upon and within the communities of which we are a part and how we create meanings, messages and information for the proliferating networks that now surround us. This is not to say that we are undergoing a revolutionary change. I tend to see history as evolutionary, which in no way precludes dramatic shifts from occurring. As learners and educators, I believe it is our responsibility to become active within this environment and to develop the critical and creative tools to respond to the “ongoing evolution of an emerging aesthetic of interactivity in which aesthetic goals are linked with ethical goals and are based on a perspective of caring for both the individual and the larger economic, political, ecological, social and spiritual circumstances that create contexts for the individual” (Gigliotti 1998, p. 89). Our cultural claims about the various factors that produce change tend to be linear — the line being one that moves along a fairly straight, if not narrow, trajectory from the less complex to the more complex. The approach that I will take looks at the displacements that are created by the movement from one phase to another — movement here being more like transportation framed by what Bruno Latour has described as “connections, short circuits, translations, associations, and mediations that we encounter, daily” (Latour 1997, p.183).