E-Learning

ISSN 1741-8887

Volume 1 Number 2 2004

CONTENTS

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

Editorial, pages 158‑161
Nicholas C. Burbules. Rethinking the Virtual, pages 162‑183
Peter Pericles Trifonas & Blane Déspres. Teaching Education and the Virtual, pages 184‑197
Bill Cope & Mary Kalantzis. Text-made Text, pages 198‑282
Tere Vadén & Juha Suoranta. Breaking Radical Monopolies: towards political economy of digital literacy, pages 283‑301
Siân Bayne. Smoothness and Striation in Digital Learning Spaces, pages 302‑316
Leonard J. Waks. The Concept of a ‘Networked Common School’, pages 317‑328
Leila Mury Bergmann. Representations of Television in Portuguese Language Textbooks in Brazil, pages 329‑335

EDITORIAL

MICHAEL A. PETERS University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

In this second issue of E-Learning there is variety in theme and substance with a series of related essays dealing with the concept of the ‘virtual’, with ‘text-made text’ and with aspects of digital literacy and learning.

Nicholas Burbules’ article, ‘Rethinking the Virtual’, begins the issue. Burbules provides a conceptual history and tries out certain definitions to arrive at the following:

key feature of the virtual is not the particular technology that produces the sense of immersion, but the sense of immersion itself (whatever might bring it about), which gives the virtual its phenomenological quality of an ‘as if’ experience.

Burbules also questions the way most definitions insist on a separation between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’, yet, as he points out, all versions of reality are made in some sense and thus the term serves only to produce a false opposition and lead us away from a more sound understanding of the virtual. On the basis of these definitional problems Burbules leads us back to Heidegger’s classic essay, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, to critique his views and to investigate the basis for the representation/reality distinction. What Burbules’ article demonstrates so well is how important philosophical analysis is to understanding the virtual and the new technologies and also how many ‘bad habits’ (if I can put it that way) are easily imported into the new domain. Burbules’ article investigates virtual time and space, and virtual place, finally to focus on virtual learning environments in ways that I am sure readers will find begin to change their understandings of ‘virtual’ in relation to ‘learning’.

Peter Trifonas & Blane Déspres extend this theme further through their article, ‘Teaching Education and the Virtual’, by asking the question whether ‘computer-mediated communication’ can take the place of full-bodied human interaction. With this question in mind they inquire:

Teaching in the virtual is a growing reality. It is a ‘virtual’ medium in that it is not necessarily resident in any particular place. It resists being institutional. That ensures a conflict of sorts with the culture of teaching. But how do teachers view IT? Or what is the relationship between IT and teaching culture?

After a careful review of the relevant literature and clear analytical discussion they summarise their discussion in the following four points:

1. Teacher education is about performance in a particular setting within a particular framework. Performance is technically dominated with behaviour seemingly left to be determined by the individual in response to a code of ethics.

2. Dilemmas in teacher knowledge are domain-specific or general:

– specific in that they are systemically situated (e.g., wages, union issues, evaluation, in-depth use of IT, learning, teaching methods, textbooks, curriculum development and implementation); – general in that similar problems exist in institutional settings (e.g. management, dealing with adolescents, workers, age groupings, resources, facilities and working conditions).

3. The nature of schooling, hence the site, precludes the proper functioning of some ideas, ideals, and orientations (e.g., open timetables, travel and other experiential learning, extended discussions).

4. Catalogued case studies and documented discourses of teaching experiences – real and contrived – for the purpose of structured learning are restricted temporally and geographically, and to technical understandings – hence practice–of teaching.

Trifonas & Déspres’s article is necessary reading for those of us interested in the virtual teacher and virtual teaching.

In a monograph-sized contribution entitled ‘Text-Made Text’ Bill Cope & Mary Kalantzis investigate in a clear and accessible way the ways in which the means of producing meaning have changed, focusing on examples from the world of print and what they call ‘designing text digitally’. Their approach is both systematic and pedagogically nuanced, and they explain ‘digital schemas for the book’ in terms of typesetting, electronic and print rendering, resource discovery, cataloguing, ecommerce and digital rights management. They outline the markup language of Common Ground [1], an automated process, before focusing on the old and the new in digital designing. This is a substantial piece of work that serves as a reference for those interested in understanding new ways of reading and writing in the non-linear web environment. As they say, ‘The book is dead. Long live the book’.

In ‘Breaking Radical Monopolies: towards political economy of digital literacy’ Tere Vadén & Juha Suoranta, as their title suggests, investigate the political economy of digital literacy on the understanding that ‘interactivity, multimodality and non-linearity, possibilities for recombination and perfect copying’ are not neutral processes. As they argue, ‘the convergence of media technologies made possible by digitalization is rapidly changing the whole landscape of media forms, use and ownership’. These kind of changes, then, and views of what they call ‘strong digital literacy’ contain in-built visions of what a desirable information society means. On the basis of this understanding of political economy they investigate digital literacy as ‘a politico-structural concept that defines the character of the information societies to come’, by focusing on ‘the issues of authorship and ownership of information’.

In the article ‘Smoothness and Striation in Digital Learning Spaces’ Siân Bayne uses Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of smooth and striated cultural spaces to explore ‘pedagogical alternatives within the learning environments of cyberspace’. In particular, Bayne is interested in ‘understanding how a theorisation of internet ‘topography’ (Nunes 1999) can inform pedagogical choice within online learning contexts’. I found her discussion of ‘pedagogies for smooth internet spaces’ and her discussion of Ulmer & LeCourt’s approaches to teaching in cyberspace both highly innovative and compelling.

In an important final article, ‘The Concept of a ‘Networked Common School’, Leonard Waks offers, as he says, ‘a reconstructive proposal for metropolitan education in the computer network era’ by focusing ‘on the growing isolation of poor racial and ethnic minority students in many metropolitan regions, and the potential of computer networks to alleviate it’. He continues, ‘I introduce a philosophical framework for engendering in-person, inter-group learning activities at regional sites, and sustaining them in ‘virtual groups’ at distributed local school sites’. This is an important article, not least because Waks directly addresses the question of a common education for equal citizenship, outlining elements of the common school tradition and its reincarnation as a networked environment. I quote his final paragraph that signals politicians, policy-makers, and educationalists:

Sooner or later the present conservative era will end, and a new era of progressive reform will commence. Its leaders must then be ready to address the problem of racial isolation in the schools. The goal of educational reform will once again become promoting the ‘over-all citizenship’ – the desire and ability of young people to live and learn and work together, despite their differences, on terms of equality. The philosophical concept of the ‘networked common school’ takes account of recent institutional changes of post-industrial societies and the new technical and organizational potentialities of computer networks. It is offered as a useful starting point in a revitalized conversation about how to address racial and ethnic isolation.

In a brief report Leila Mury Bergmann investigates representations of television in written texts found in elementary school Portuguese language textbooks from 5th to 8th grade in Brazil, which is a summary of her doctoral thesis.

Note

[1] ‘Founded as an educational and academic publisher in 1984, Common Ground has evolved into a producer and manager of content for print and the Internet. The company works in four related areas, Common Ground Conferences, Common Ground Publishing, Common Ground Research and Common Ground Software’. See http://commongroundgroup.com/About/

MICHAEL A. PETERS
University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

Rethinking the Virtual

NICHOLAS C. BURBULES University of Illinois, USA

The author builds theoretically off an alternative conception of the virtual, through a series of steps. First, he explores four processes of engagement through which immersion happens (interest, involvement, imagination and interaction); these will prove especially important for understanding the educational potential of virtuality. Second, he applies this conception of the virtual to a discussion of virtual space and time, suggesting that as virtual spaces become familiar and significant, they become virtual places. Two ways in which this transformation can take place are architecture and mapping, and the author suggests that in educational contexts these processes broadly relate to the perspectives of teacher and learner, respectively. Architecture and mapping represent the structures or design elements in which the four aspects of immersion are guided towards learning goals; when these structures are successful, the process of immersion involves students strongly in the activities of learning. In this sense, then, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that all successful learning environments are, to some extent, ‘virtual’. One way to think of this project is as an attempt to rethink virtuality outside of an exclusively technological domain, and to see it as a central educational concept.

Teaching Education and the Virtual

PETER PERICLES TRIFONAS Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada
BLANE DÉSPRES University College of the Okanagan, Canada

This text weighs the ethical consequences of a virtual education that posits a learning community based on the free exchange of ideas and the economy of knowledge cultivating the circulation of ideas. It explores the ethical implications of a virtual educational enterprise characterised by exchanges that do not take place face to face but are still grounded within the belief that technology can offer an ethical form of instruction responsive and responsible to individuals, groups and communities.

Text-made Text

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

What is the nature of the change represented by digital communications technologies? How will the impact of the digital compare with the massive changes spawned in its time by print and books? These are the two key questions addressed in this article. The authors answer the first of these questions by comparing the emergence of the printed book with the emergence of the digital communications technologies. The next section of this article, ‘Transformations in Ways of Meaning: the case of print’, discusses the technological nature and textual consequences of the printing press. The following section, ‘Transformations in Ways of Meaning: designing text digitally’, does the same for digital connectivity. Several themes emerge.

Breaking Radical Monopolies: towards political economy of digital literacy

TERE VADÉN University of Tampere, Finland JUHA SUORANTA University of Joensuu, Finland

In this article, the authors argue for a leap from a ‘weak’ digital literacy (skills of interpretation and strategies of reception) to strong digital literacy (authorship and autonomous skills and capacities). Strong digital literacy implies politico-structural analysis of the information societies to come. Given the current forms of economic production and corporate markets, the liberating and democratic potential of digital information is counteracted by the concentration of media ownership, as well as by policy, legislation, and the development of propriety forms of technology. The authors apply the concept of radical monopoly in analysing the possibilities of strong digital literacy in two contexts: education and computer software. In these, as in other areas, digital technology promises abundance, but only if the formal vision of the information society in the singular is overcome. This would not only mean interaction and authorship, but breaking the preconfigured bubble of racially monopolised information.

Smoothness and Striation in Digital Learning Spaces

SIÂN BAYNE University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

It is Deleuze & Guattari’s description of smooth and striated cultural spaces (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988) which informs this exploration of pedagogical alternatives within the learning environments of cyberspace. Digital spaces work to constitute subject and text in ways which are distinct, and it is awareness of this distinctiveness which must inform our engagement with the internet as a space for learning and teaching. By using Deleuze & Guattari’s conceptualisation of the smooth and the striated, the author works towards a way of understanding how a theorisation of internet ‘topography’ can inform pedagogical choice within online learning contexts. The author begins with a summary of the relation between the striated and the smooth as defined by Deleuze & Guattari, and moves on to consider how this distinction can be extended into the environments of cyberspace. She then explores how a pedagogical approach might be developed which attempts to inhabit ‘smooth’ internet spaces, and ends with a consideration of the virtual learning environment or ‘e-learning system’ which, in defining itself as a space of containment, regulation and efficient progression, functions as a strongly striating element within pedagogical web space.

The Concept of a ‘Networked Common School’

LEONARD J. WAKS Temple University, Philadelphia, USA

The current educational arrangements of advanced liberal democracies continue to isolate various ethnic and racial groups. Disadvantaged minority students attend inferior schools. The overreliance on the curriculum as a design for teaching and learning renders school learning less relevant for ‘knowledge work’ jobs in network societies. The concept of a ‘networked common school’ addresses these problems. It envisions linking local schools in a social network mediated by networked computers. Teaching and learning will continue to take place at local sites, but significant face-to-face, inter-group learning will take place at regional learning centers, to be followed up by virtual group learning at distributed local sites.

Representations of Television in Portuguese Language Textbooks in Brazil

LEILA MURY BERGMANN Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, and State University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

This article discusses representations of television in written texts found in elementary school Portuguese language textbooks (PLTb) from 5th to 8th grade. In order to obtain the necessary information for this article, six PLTb collections were selected (out of the 35 that were analyzed and approved by Brazil’s National Textbook Program – PNLD – in 2002). This work is referenced in Cultural Studies, a field of study that considers culture to be central and constitutive in/of all the aspects of social life, emphasizing the analysis that sees pedagogy as a complex and comprehensive phenomenon. The analysis is developed using six categories (TV/alienation; TV/violence/values; TV/ nostalgia; TV/consumption/advertisement; TV/teacher/news/information; and TV/pros). The conclusion is that most of the texts studied approach the negative effects of television; the ways it could incite violence, diminish intelligence, alienate the subjects and deceive the spectator – that is, a very present topic in students’ lives – possibly assuming it would be of their liking. The referred technology is portrayed as harmful and negative. In order to discuss the distinct categories, a dialogue between the different conceptions that emerge at the TV/Tb intersection was developed.

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