This paper attempts to reassess the educational affordances of digital screens, at a time when their educational impact has become incontournable, but is also increasingly growing suspicion. To bypass the redundancies of overly critical theoretical approaches, the paper foregrounds the subjectifying potentialities of the screen’s elusive technological ‘plasticity’. After the introduction, in which some pedagogical misgivings about the digital screen are addressed, we turn to Marie-José Mondzain’s historico-philosophical genealogy of iconoclasm. Trying to make sense of the aesthetic-political ambivalence that shrouded (...) the icon’s screenic agency within a Christian ‘economy of salvation’, and which climaxed in a politics of strictly economic equivalency, we concur with Peter Szendy that this ambivalence still haunts the icon’s contemporary heirs. By pedagogically re-reading Szendy’s alternative account of ‘iconomy’ we are subsequently led to make a case for exceeding neoliberal screening politics through an affirmation of the digital screen’s radical plasticity. Along with Yves Citton, we suggest, in our conclusion, that this post-critical affirmation calls for an ‘iconomical’ practice of care-ful experiments with the screen’s dynamic technologies. Instead of combating or adapting to its aesthetically dazzling algorithms, educational practices are required that allow these algorithmic quantities to qualitatively differentiate the uses that educands make of them. (shrink)

While virtual simulations are a familiar professional training tool, they have only recently been implemented in teacher education programs. These simulations are used to complement traditional student teacher placement. In this paper, the author critically examines one teacher training simulation, TeachLivE, specifically in terms of its implicit conceptions of what it means to teach and to learn. The analysis utilizes Aristotle’s explanation of the Greek concepts energeia and dunamis, as well as Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The author argues that (...) TeachLivE’s structure implies an ontology of teaching and learning that precludes the cultivation of a teacherly disposition, and that, were this ontology to be corrected, teacher training simulations would be rendered superfluous. (shrink)

El cambio a la educación en línea que se produjo durante la pandemia del coronavirus puso en primer plano las preguntas sobre el valor y la conveniencia de una universidad totalmente en línea. Este artículo explora hasta qué punto es deseable una universidad totalmente en línea desde una perspectiva educativa, en la que la educación se considera una experiencia valiosa tomada en sí misma, independientemente de su resultado. Parto de la hipótesis de que una dimensión fundamental de las prácticas de (...) estudio en la universidad es la experiencia del pensamiento colectivo desencadenado por acuerdos materiales y sociales específicos. Procedo a describir las condiciones materiales para desencadenar el pensamiento en términos de lo que llamo desplazamiento mediático, que es una forma de integrar los medios en las prácticas educativas que permite un tipo de atención fluctuante. El artículo concluye argumentando que necesitamos desarrollar nuevas tecnologías para la educación en línea y entrenar nuestra atención deliberadamente para los entornos en línea estableciendo nuevos protocolos para tratar la dispersión digital de la atención. (shrink)

The switch to online education that occurred during the Corona pandemic brought to the fore questions about the value and desirability of a fully online university. This article explores to what extent is a fully online university desirable from an educational perspective, whereby education is seen as a valuable experience taken in itself, regardless of its output. I start from the hypothesis that a fundamental dimension of study practices at the university is the experience of collective thinking triggered by specific (...) material and social arrangements. I proceed to describe material conditions for triggering thinking in terms of what I call mediatic displacement, which is a way of integrating media into educational practices that enables a fluctuating type of attention. The paper concludes by arguing that we need to develop new technologies for online education and train our attention deliberately for online environments by establishing new protocols for dealing with the digital scattering of attention. (shrink)