Postdigital We-Learn

Abstract

This paper examines relationships between learning and technological change and argues that we urgently need new ways to approach what it means to learn in the context of a global Fourth Industrial Revolution. It briefly introduces the postdigital perspective, which considers the digital ‘revolution’ as something that has already happened and focuses to its reconfiguration. It claims that what we access, how we access it, what we do with it, and who then accesses what we have done, are important elements of a postdigital world worthy of closer examination. Focusing to recent debates about postdigital collective intelligence, we develop the concept of postdigital we-learn by showing that it might help us, amongst other things, to counter the idea of a lone human accessing education primarily for future individual, economic profit, as prescribed by the neoliberal learning economy. Building on new schools of thought emerging in response to the expansion of non-human (algorithmic) agency, we refine the concept of postdigital we-learn as a gathering between humans and machines. The consequences of this gathering are uncomfortable, as they imply unlearning elements of both capitalism and critical pedagogy. However, such unlearning is inherent to ‘a critical pedagogy of becoming’ and positions postdigital we-learn as a suitable framework for understanding and development of emancipatory, critical learning in our postdigital reality.