Cyborg Identity, Trauma, and Online Learning

Abstract

The integration of technology into the individual’s sense of self has changed our identity. The cultural shift to a digital landscape of learning has not lived up to its original expectations as a space where everyone is free to learn without the racial, gender, and socioeconomic identities that are tied to cultural trauma. The utopian view has given way to the knowledge that algorithms are coded with bias, and discussion posts are responded to with the same bias we find in  traditional classrooms. Faculty are becoming, and resisting, being experts in the integration of technology into representations of self. The cyborg approach to learning encourages each of us to ask new questions about learning in environments that free us from the need to be physically present, but can imitate markers of identity that replicate societal trauma.