E-Learning and Digital Media
ISSN 2042-7530

Volume 1 Number 1 2004

CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text]

Editorial, E-Learning Machines, pages 1‑8
Douglas Kellner. Technological Transformation, Multiple Literacies, and the Re-visioning of Education, pages 9‑37
Mary Kalantzis & Bill Cope. Designs for Learning, pages 38‑93
James Dwight. ‘I’m Just Shy’: using structured computer-mediated communication to disrupt masculine discursive norms, pages 94‑104
Michalinos Zembylas & Charalambos Vrasidas. Emotion, Reason and Information and Communication Technologies in Education: some issues in a post-emotional society, pages 105‑127
Nicki Hedge & Louise Hayward. Redefining Roles: university e-learning contributing to lifelong learning in a networked world? pages 128‑145
REVIEW ESSAY
On the Internet (Hubert Dreyfus) reviewed by James Dwight, pages 146‑152 VIEW FULL TEXT
BOOK REVIEW
Digital Academe: new media in education and learning (William H. Dutton & Brian D. Loader, Eds), reviewed by David Scotson & Craig Brown, pages 153‑154 VIEW FULL TEXT
Notes on Contributors, pages 155‑157 VIEW FULL TEXT

EDITORIAL E-Learning Machines

MICHAEL A. PETERS University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

I am delighted to write this editorial for the inaugural issue of E-Learning. It is an exciting first issue with articles from a range of experts who analyse and discuss in critical and constructive terms some fundamental aspects of e-learning – a concept whose time has come. Yet it has passed almost silently into the language of education without much critical thought. It is as though the addition of ‘e’ – with a hyphen – indicates simply a change of medium as though it was ‘business as usual’, except we experience the substitution of an electronic medium for classroom ‘talk’ or other structured educational media instruction. It was Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media philosopher, who first taught us to look at the deep structure of media when he stated ‘the medium is the message’, the title of his famous book, later changing it to The Medium is the Massage (McLuhan, 1967). McLuhan, we must remember was educated at Cambridge by I.A. Richards and schooled on James Joyce, the symbolist poets and Ezra Pound. In other words, he had a well-developed appreciation of literature and had gained sophisticated knowledge and practice of its tools of analysis as a basis for his critical approach to understanding media.[1] With e-learning, then, we must be willing to recognise the deep structure of the medium and this means, among other things, to learn to become sceptical of histories that are ‘event driven’ or ‘personality driven’ or ‘technology driven’.

In conversation with a colleague and friend, Bob Davis at the University of Glasgow, I was recently reminded of Jonathan Swift’s ‘writing machine’ as he sketches it in Book 4 of Gulliver’s Travels:

The first professor I saw was in a very large room, with forty pupils about him. After salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a frame, which took up the greatest part of both the length and breadth of the room, he said perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical operations.
 But the world would soon be sensible of its usefulness, and he flattered himself that a more noble exalted thought never sprang in any other man’s head. Everyone knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas by his contrivance the most ignorant person at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, may write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study. He then led me to the frame, about the sides whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty foot square, placed in the middle of the room. The superficies was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered on every square with paper pasted on them, and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions, but without any order. The professor then desired me to observe, for he was going to set his engine at work. The pupils at his command took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the lads to read the several lines softly as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn the engine was so contrived that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down. Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labour, and the professor showed me several volumes in large folio already collected, of broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences; which however might be still improved, and much expedited, if the public would raise a fund for making and employing five hundred such frames in Lagado, and oblige the managers to contribute in common their several collections. He assured me, that this invention had employed all his thoughts from his youth, that he had emptied the whole vocabulary into his frame, and made the strictest computation of the general proportion there is in books between the numbers of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of speech. (Swift, 1967, pp. 232‑233)

Swift’s description is not entirely removed from the realm of fact, at least as it is presented in histories of learning technologies. It also reminded me of various ‘teaching machines’ that promised an automation of teaching and learning. And perhaps also thinking, in the sense of metacognition models based on computer simulations; brains as neural nets and thinking as a form of computation. Swift’s writing machine also set up a round of resonances that mapped out the history of computing machines, beginning with Leonardo da Vinci and, in the modern age, with John Napier (1550‑1617), who invented logarithms – an indispensable aid to calculation, and his ‘bones’ or rods as an instrument for computing use in multiplication. Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio (1614) and Mirifici logarithmorum canonis constructio (1619) developed the concept of logarithms and elaborated the first table of them.[2] Soon after Pascal designed the first mechanical adding machine, allegedly to free his father – a tax collector – from the burdensome task of adding columns of figures. We are told that the ‘Pascaline’ ‘is 36 cm long, 13 cm wide and 8 cm high’, roughly the size of a shoebox.

The surface is metal. There are eight windows on the top of it. Inside each of the windows, one can see a small drum with the result digits designed on it. Each drum has two rows of numbers. One black row under one red row. The black row of numbers is dealing with addition and the red row is dealing with subtraction. Every time that an addition is taking place one horizontal slat is covering the red row of the numbers. The black row of numbers is being covered when one wants to make a subtraction.[3]

There was also Wilhelm Schickard, who invented a mechanical calculator in 1623.

Between Pascal’s invention in 1624 and 1820 there were over 20 manufacturers of calculating machines. Before long experimenters realised that Pascal’s machine could also perform multiplication. Leibniz (1646‑1716), the German philosopher, made this improvement in 1671 completing his first calculating machine in 1694. His ‘machina arithmetica’, which performed addition, division and multiplication, set the stage for the so-called ‘Difference Engine’ or ‘analytical machine’ of Charles Babbage (1791‑1871), often referred to as the father of computing.[4]

The history of computing through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries accelerated its development in the twentieth with Konrad Zuse’s first freely programmable computer in 1936, the development of the Harvard Mark 1 computer by Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper, its transistorisation in 1948, the introduction of the integrated circuit (‘chip’) in 1958, the development of ARPAnet in 1969 (the original Net), the emergence of networking in 1973, the marketing of the first consumer computers in 1974, the development of word processors in 1979, and finally, the emergence and development of the Internet and its widespread consumer and commercial use during the 1990s.[5] We now face second-generation and third-generation Internet development.[6]

In this rapidly evolving contemporary history, one might be tempted to think that the history of teaching and learning machines, indeed, the history of e-learning, was purely a technical matter, prescribed by technological change and the invention of machines. Yet this machinic history certainly gives way when the ‘events’ are relocated within a wider political economy of learning and educational change and when the ‘culturalisation’ of technical knowledge raises the stakes of the argument, as an example of symbol manipulation.

Clearly, the impact of the Web on the reading, writing and diffusion of knowledge is not technically determined although it may be technically enabled. In a recent virtual symposium ‘Screens and Networks: towards a new relationship with the written word?’ (spring 2001), some of the world’s author(itie)s were ‘speakers’, involving participants in leading fields in a series of questions and speculations concerning e-reading and e-writing. Their combined comments illustrate the way in which the field of e-learning must take account of larger economies – textual, symbolic, political, informational and cultural. It also graphically reminds us how this field remains to be theorised. Roger Chartier’s ‘Readers and Readings in the Electronic Age’, for instance, posed the following questions for discussion: ‘How does one read on-screen? Does the change in the support of texts mean that the contents of texts will change as well? What are the texts that will still be called ‘books’ once they are made available through the unified medium of screens?’ Dan Sperber, by contrast, in ‘Reading without Writing’, defends the thesis that ‘the revolution in information and communication technology may soon turn writing into a relic of the past: it will be replaced by the automatic transcription of speech – whereas reading is here to stay’. Where Roberto Casati speculates on ‘What the Internet tells us about the Real Nature of the Book’– the book is both a physical and a mental entity which poses an ontological problem – Jason Epstein argues that ‘most digital files will be printed and bound on demand at point of sale by machines – now in prototype – which within minutes will inexpensively make single copies that are indistinguishable from books made in factories’. He suggests that ‘these neighborhood machines for making paperbound books can, like ATMs, be placed wherever electricity and supplies of paper exist’. The Bibliothèque Publique d’Information asks ‘What is a library in the numerical age? In an institution which, traditionally, is devoted to the written word and to its memory, the advent of unstable and potentially infinite information could put in question the very nature of the library.’[7]

The symposium itself was a major experiment of e-learning. As the moderators indicated in the period immediately after 15 October 2001:

Some 3,500 people went to see the site every two weeks to read a new text. Over 60,000 people visited our site, 795 people subscribed in order to be able to participate in the debates, and 2,292 people downloaded eBooks – a total of 7,277 individual eBooks. The archived debates contain 662 comments and questions sent by the invited participants, the speakers and all those who took part in text-e.

The symposium provided a variety of forms of participation and demonstrated that the notion and form of the symposium – an ancient vehicle for scholarly communication and learning – is perfectly adaptable to the Internet. It comprises prepared texts by invited speakers, discussants who have previously read the papers, public discussion, moderated debate – all in the service of shared goals and research questions. And the virtual symposium not only reflected the traditional form; it enhanced it and increased the availability, flexibility and accessibility of knowledge in a highly interactive forum. Surely, one way to proceed in e-learning theory and practice is to examine the transformation of learning forms – the lecture, the tutorial, the seminar, the dialogue, the group discussion – all of which have a complex history that deny their familiarity. And yet despite their contemporariness – their pervasiveness, availability, durability and seeming ordinariness – these are often ancient learning forms that parallel genres of writing and styles of reading, as well as their cultural and technical transformations.

It is these concerns and possibilities that first brought together the editorial team as a collective, and motivated them to found a journal that has the clear policy intention of scrutinising the dominant technicist view, where the new technologies are held to provide for a learner-centred, market-driven model of education based on tele-learning in cyberspace. As we comment in our policy statement:

This vision tends to obscure cultural differences, insisting that the model could be applied equally anywhere in the world. In fact, it is often touted as the global solution to the problem of modern education. The purported justification for such a vision lies in systems theory and ‘education as communication’. From this perspective the classroom becomes a communication machine, and communication is reduced to the three functions of transmitting, storing and processing information. This is often seen to constitute the ‘new paradigm of education’. It is a paradigm that is seen to overcome the traditional problems of space, storage and time of conventional education. In addition, it is seen to be learner-centred, problem-focused, flexible, accessible and much cheaper than conventional arrangements. Anyone can access information at any time and both the home and the workplace will become communication systems for education. According to this vision of e-learning, education becomes the global educational utility based upon forms of teleconferencing and the virtual classroom.

The critical intent of the journal is clear but we are also interested in the evaluative, the empirical, the philosophical and the speculative as well. We look forward to engagement with the issues of e-learning in all its related facets.

In this first issue, it is very much the case that contributors have sought to explore sympathetically the new medium and its consequences for learning. In the opening article, Douglas Kellner argues ‘that educators need to cultivate multiple literacies for contemporary technological and multicultural societies, that teachers need to develop new literacies of diverse sorts, including a more fundamental importance for print literacy, to meet the challenge of restructuring education for a high-tech, multicultural society, and global culture’. Kellner is one of the leading educators in the tradition of critical theory and critical pedagogy and he turns his attention to the re-visioning of education under conditions of technical transformation, where the new technologies reposition the education role as crucial in an everyday communication society. Under these conditions Kellner makes the case for multiple literacies as the means to empower individuals and groups who are structurally disadvantaged in a vision of education responsive to the needs of a democratic and multicultural society.

In an extended article, the size of a substantial monograph, entitled ‘Designs for Learning’, Mary Kalantzis & Bill Cope provide us with a comprehensive view and model for learning, curriculum and pedagogy. As they explain:

This article explores the dynamics of education, curriculum and pedagogy as designs for learning. It builds upon and extends the authors’ earlier research and development interventions including their involvement in the Social Literacy Project (Kalantzis & Cope, 1989a), the development of the Genre Approach to Literacy (Cope & Kalantzis, 1993b), the Multiliteracies project (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000) and the New Learning Charter (Kalantzis & Cope, 2001a). It has been written as a base document for the Learning Design Language project which commenced in 2002, involving groups of educators in Australia (in Victoria, Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales and Queensland), Greece and Malaysia.

Their conception is powerful and it has been very influential. It is influential because it addresses practical questions in a refreshing non-technical way. They set out the key questions of their article as: ‘What makes for success and failure in learning, and how do we best design the learning experiences that constitute pedagogy, curriculum and education?’ And they refine their question by focusing on the cultural conditions of learning. The article is a sustained and coherent account given as an answer to this question. We are, indeed, lucky to begin this issue with such a unified and universal approach to a question with such a daunting intellectual pedigree.

In the essay ‘I’m Just Shy’ James Dwight uses structured computer-mediated communication to disrupt masculine discursive norms, as his subtitle reveals. He begins with the observation that although women comprise the vast majority of students in word processing classes, the numbers of women in computer science, taking engineering doctorates and employed in the information technology sector are, by comparison, well below parity. This has prompted educators to call for a more inclusive computer culture. The purpose of this article, as Dwight indicates, ‘is to illustrate how young women have internalized their gendered inferiority and to establish teaching practices that disrupt such gendered discursive norms’ and he draws on post-feminists and cyberculture critics for his analysis. In particular, at the level of practice Dwight is concerned to demonstrate how teaching education can challenge gender dichotomies and differences. He investigates ‘the tropes of hyperspace and gender’, ‘the hyperbole underlying disembodied discourse in hyperspaces’, and how to disrupt masculine discursive norms.

In a thematically related article, Michalinos Zembylas and Charalambos Vrasidas focus on emotion and reason in a ‘post-emotional society’ (Mestrovic) and ask the key questions ‘how do learners talk and write about ‘emotion’ and ‘reason’ online?’ and ‘what are the implications of various descriptions of emotion and reason on learners within ICT contexts?’ Certainly, one of the critical issues that cyber-educationalists must begin to fathom is the meaning of the affective experiences of teaching and learning online. The authors begin by investigating the historical and cultural production of ‘emotion’ and ‘reason’ as oppositional constructs deeply embedded in Cartesian culture. Next they examine what it means to live in a ‘post-emotional society’, examining Mestrovic’s ideas and their usefulness in theorising cyberspace. They maintain on the basis of their own research that the expression of emotion in learning environments may be better in some respects. They argue that while ‘online interaction may be slower and ‘lacking’ in continuity, richness, and immediacy, when compared to face-to-face interaction, in some ways online interaction may be as good as or even superior to face-to-face’. The authors come to the conclusion that ‘electronic networks can function as new ‘social nodes’ ... for the fostering of multiple and flexible ‘emotional affinities’ ... that face-to-face interactions might not provide for some people’. The full implications of what they call ‘new forms of emotional experiences in online interactions’ are worthy of detailed study and their notion of a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ provides a theoretical point of departure for educators.

In the last article, Nicki Hedge and Louise Hayward examine the role of university e-learning in contributing to lifelong learning in a networked world. While it has a contribution to make, just what role it should play is still open to question, depending as it does on multiple interpretations both in policy and practice. They argue that not only could distance e-learning enable lifelong learning but that ‘lifelong learning, broadly interpreted, should be a cornerstone of university strategy and activity in a world that is increasingly networked’.

In addition to these articles, James Dwight provides an insightful analysis and review of Hubert Dreyfus’s On the Internet and David Scotson and Craig Brown provide a review of the edited book by William H. Dutton and Brian D. Loader, Digital Academe: new media in higher education and learning.

This is a very substantial first issue and we would like to thank all our contributors and to welcome paper submissions from our readers. We are also interested in sponsoring special issues on experimental themes and scholars wishing to propose such a theme should contact Michael A. Peters with their proposal.

Notes

[1] See the official site of Marshall McLuhan at: www.marshallmcluhan.com/
[2] See Undusting Napier’s Bones: www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~greg/calculators/napier/
[3] See About Pascaline: www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~greg/calculators/pascal/ About_Pascaline.htm
[4] See The Babbage Pages: www.ex.ac.uk/BABBAGE/ and Charles Babbage: www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Babbage.html
[5] See A Brief History of Mechanical Calculators. Part I: The age of the polymaths by James Redin at: www.dotpoint.com/xnumber/mechanical1.htm; and The History of Computing at: www.ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/ See also A Brief History of the Internet at: www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml#Timeline
[6] See Prasanna Kumar Jagannathan’s Global Next Generation Internet Initiatives at: www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~jain/cis788‑99/ftp/testbeds/index.html#summary
[7] The website for the symposium is: www.text-e.org/. The full e-texts and eBooks are available from the site.

References
McLuhan, M. with Quentin Fiore, coordinated by Jerome Angel (1967) The Medium is the Massage. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Swift, J. (1967) Gulliver’s Travels. Harmondsworth: Penguin (first published 1726).

Technological Transformation, Multiple Literacies, and the Re-visioning of Education

DOUGLAS KELLNER University of California, Los Angeles, USA

In light of globalization and technological developments, this article argues that educators need to cultivate multiple literacies for contemporary technological and multicultural societies, that teachers need to develop a range of literacies of diverse sorts, including a more fundamental importance for print literacy, to meet the challenge of restructuring education for a hi-tech, multicultural society, and global economy and culture. Drawing on Dewey, Freire, Illich and others, the author argues for a reconstruction of education to increase democratization and to make education more relevant to the challenges of the contemporary era. In particular, it is maintained that by introducing multiple literacies to empower individuals and groups traditionally excluded, education could be reconstructed to make it more responsive to the challenges of a democratic and multicultural society.

Designs for Learning

MARY KALANTZIS RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
BILL COPE Centre for Workplace Communuication and Culture, Melbourne, Australia

This article explores the potentials of new pedagogical approaches, assisted by digital technologies, to transform today’s learning environments and create learning for the future – learning environments which could be more relevant to a changing world, more effective in meeting community expectations and which manage educational resources more efficiently. Equally important, the challenge is to create learning environments which engage the sensibilities of learners who are increasingly immersed in digital and global lifestyles – from the entertainment sources they choose to the way they work and learn. The experimental work upon which this article is based is grounded in a philosophy of teaching and learning that values a variety of active ways of knowing. Teaching that harnesses diversity and leads to learner transformation involves a variety of knowledge processes that need to be made explicit and part of a teacher’s pedagogical repertoire. The tools described in the article provide a way for educators to reflect on their choices, document their learning programs, map curriculum, share effective practice and write up learning community goals. They also allow students to build, share, collaborate upon and publish portfolios of the work they have created digitally. The result will be greater transparency and accountability amongst those who share responsibility for education.

‘I’m Just Shy’: using structured computer-mediated communication to disrupt masculine discursive norms

JAMES DWIGHT Millersville University, USA

In the context of a class is of pre-service, undergraduate educational technology, primary and secondary majors, the author explores feminist theories and post-structuralist theories regarding gender dichotomies to better comprehend how young women have internalized cultural biases informing them that computers are masculine artifacts. The issues are addressed in both in-class discussion and online forums. Because discursive norms tend to favour masculine voices, the author used Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) to disrupt assumptions regarding public/private discourse by intentionally structuring these spaces to limit aggressive rhetorical attacks (i.e. flaming) that young men are more apt to use than young women. The results so far have proved encouraging. The author elaborates on these successes by comparing differences from female and male contributions to a post-class, open-ended (qualitative/ethnographic) survey.

Emotion, Reason, and Information and Communication Technologies in Education: some issues in a post-emotional society

MICHALINOS ZEMBYLAS Intercollege, Cyprus and Michigan State University, USA
CHARALAMBOS VRASIDAS Intercollege, Cyprus and Western Illinois University, USA

In this article, the authors work across issues of information and communication technologies (ICT) in education to explore the meaning of emotional experience in the context of online learning. In light of Mestrovic’s (1997) notion of a ‘post-emotional’ society and the increasing role of ICT in education, it is argued that educators need to rethink, modify, or extend some of the assumptions made about the relationship between emotion and reason (e.g. as these assumptions are expressed in the traditional binaries between body and mind, and emotion and reason). The argument put forward is that opportunities and consequent decisions and actions about particular pedagogical practices and philosophies must engage with an analysis of the meaning and implications of these assumptions for learning and learners.

Redefining Roles: university e-learning contributing to lifelong learning in a networked world?

NICKI HEDGE & LOUISE HAYWARD University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

Distance education enabled by e-learning is at the forefront of university participation in an increasingly connected world. Physical, temporal, cultural and educational borders are becoming both less rigid and less predictable than ever before. The authors suggest, in this article, that university distance e-learning could and should allow universities to make a major contribution to lifelong learning in this networked world. However, just as lifelong learning and distance e-learning are subject to multiple interpretations and realisations, the role that universities might play in contributing to global lifelong learning is currently far from clear. Both distance education, as a mode of learning and teaching, and lifelong learning, as an aspiration and a policy, bring issues pertaining to the roles and values of universities into sharp focus. On the fluid, unpredictable landscape of global higher education are traced the imperatives driving distance e-learning and lifelong learning in order to discern the redrawing of borders that appears to be emerging. The parallels between unsettled territories and unresolved tensions in distance e-learning and lifelong learning will be highlighted. The authors suggest that distance e-learning could enable lifelong learning and that lifelong learning, broadly interpreted, should be a cornerstone of university strategy and activity in a world that is increasingly networked.

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