Information Technology Reference
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Fig. 16.3
Edited still from “Light Shifts” a multimodal powerpoint presentation (Cunliffe, 2008)
multi-media dialogue effectively evoking that “dialogic space” between and around
different media that enables meaning to transgress and to transfer. Figure 16.3
gives an edited version still combining light and text but to this you have to add
in imagination, movement, music, and voice.
Blogging as an Example of Induction into and Creation
of Dialogic Space
The problem with neo-Vygotskian accounts of how we learn to think is that they
focus on the tools within the dialogue rather than the space of dialogue itself. Some
have argued in this neo-Vygotskian way, that writing provides a kind of cognitive
technology for mediated thinking, especially through tools like tables and lists that
make abstract formal thinking possible (e.g Goody, 1977). Walter Ong makes a
different point when he describes how the initial custom of reading texts aloud in
groups was gradually replaced by silent individual reading. This habit, combined
with the sense of closure in printed texts as if thought could become a thing sup-
ported the development of a sense of a fixed inner self separate from the interplay
of communal life. This was conceptualized as a new “inner space” from which indi-
viduals had the freedom to reflect critically on the culture around them (Ong, 1982).
This kind of sense of an inner space of freedom that one carries around with one is
the very model of the “autonomous self” that education systems still aim to produce
(Biesta, 2006). Ong's careful and persuasive case offers a model for relating tech-
nologies to the development of embodied higher order thinking. On the whole, in
