| E-Learning |
ISSN 1741-8887 | ||
|
Volume 2 Number 2 2005 | |||
Other issues available | Journal home page | Publisher home page | |||
|
|||
|
CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text] | |||
|
| |||
Editorial,
pages 99‑103
| |||
| EDITORIAL |
| VIEW FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
| The emphasis in this issue is very much on substantive critique of important themes related to e-learning. In keeping with the ethos of the journal, all six articles in this issue have a strong critical edge. Four of the articles target specific objects for extended critique. These cover a diverse range, including: critique of dominant positions on online education in universities; of paradigm stances on ICT and education that talk past each other and rob the field of a fruitful conversation among and across different positions; broad tendencies within classroom appropriations of new technologies that lack potential for tackling educational disadvantage; pedagogy that creates and sustains binaries while limiting the capacity of students to transcend them; prevalent conceptions of what is ‘new’ in ‘new’ technologies and ‘new’ literacies; and specific positions within work concerned with new kinds of social interaction made possible by digital gaming. The issue opens with Edward Hamilton & Andrew Feenberg’s account of ‘The Technical Codes of Online Education’. The authors note that while online education began with the pioneering efforts of academics in the very early years of online communications, it was really only in the late 1990s after fiscal crises had hit universities that online education became a fully fledged movement. Needless to say, that ‘movement’ was vastly different from the original vision of academics working in the early 1980s. In the context of the late 1990s, ‘online education was called upon to solve some of the deepest economic, pedagogical, and organisational problems of the university’: in effect, to become a linchpin of university education reform. The authors observe that in the debate around reform directions from the late 1990s online education has tended to appear in one or other of two registers. One side presents a story of the progressive development of technology as it is applied to the organisation of higher education, leading to pedagogical advances and to the new forms of administration required for the realisation of the technology’s full potentials, both pedagogical and economic. The other side views online education as a lever of neoliberal reform that extends to the university a form of capitalism that is now digital, global, and knowledge-based. Both sides of the debate share the same underlying philosophy of technology, according to which technology is a fait accompli with which the university must comply or which it must reject out of hand in defence of traditional academic values and priorities. The situation has reached an impasse: one in which ‘online education’ has been reified and frozen into a form associated with information delivery and learning management systems, institutional standards, and so on. People laud or resist, but largely around a set conception of what online education is. Hamilton and Feenberg look to critical theory of technology to provide a way out of this impasse, arguing that critical theory provides a philosophical orientation capable of widening the debate over online education and university restructuring through its emphasis ‘on the dynamics of technological design and development as social and political processes’. What online education is can vary markedly from case to case, context to context. To begin with, ‘networked learning can be based on the computer’s relational rather than its representational capacities’. Yet, debate circulates (and ‘impasses’) around the assumption of the computer’s representational capacities as given. A key to moving beyond current impasses and inertias lies in understanding the particular ‘technical codes’ that guide particular ‘technological designs’. Using an empirical case (the School of Management and Strategic Studies at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in 1982) for exemplification, the authors argue that all technological design is predicated on some prior definition of the situation in which and for which the technologies will be applied: Education must be defined in a functional, social, and organisational sense before a technology can be developed to support it. The technology may embody a pedagogical model that carries certain political implications for society or career consequences for professional educators, but it only does so through an iterative process through which pedagogical assumptions, values, and roles are delegated to technical systems. For example, some ‘prior definitions’ may lead to computer-assisted instruction designs, while others (as in the case study) may lead to dialogic computer conferencing. It all depends on the ‘technical code’ that guides the design developed for a particular context. The ‘technical code’ is, precisely, ‘the background of values, assumptions, definitions, and roles that guides technological design’. Hence: The technical code of online education is relative, then, to the interests, assumptions, and values of the actors who are engaged in the design and development process, and who are thus positioned as powerful interpreters of the technology and the social forms it mediates. In other words, and among many other things, online education is up for grabs. There is a politics at stake. What we end up with in the name of online education in the places we work will be a function of what we do, or don’t do. If we are content to try and organize our pedagogy around WebCT or Blackboard, with a bit of Smartboarding thrown in for good measure, that is a political choice. If we want something different we will have to work and struggle for it. Hamilton and Feenberg remind us that the key question to be asked in engaging the politics of online education is whether: educational technologies and online programmes will work to facilitate the transmission of static information, fostering standardised modes of interaction between human users, machines and commodified knowledge, or whether they can be rooted in an essentially social ideal of education, extending and enabling new forms of mediated interaction. Technology could potentially support either one of these outcomes. But, as outcomes, they are in no sense given prior to specific appropriations within particular social settings. At the same time, to respond to this question, to enact a counter-politics of dialogic online education, may entail considerable hard work and new learning. Feenberg’s own work marks one extreme of what may be involved. He has developed an open source alternative to proprietary learning management systems, based on his particular pedagogical conceptions and commitments. Not everyone who wants an alternative to proprietary ‘solutions’ will have, or be in a position to get, the necessary programming expertise for generating their own alternatives in the way that people like Feenberg do. On the other hand, becoming aware of the kind of possibilities and options available and how to source them (and reciprocate as appropriate) constitutes an alternative strategy. This too is hard work, but work of a different order, albeit profoundly pedagogical work worthy of those who would call themselves educators under contemporary conditions. In the second article, ‘Games as Exchange’, Amy Scholder & Eric Zimmerman focus on digital games as systems of social interaction, looking at the ‘rich social fabric of game play and game culture’ through the varying observations and perspectives of leading games designers and commentators recorded as online interchange. The article builds around a series of orienting statements on diverse themes to which participants respond. The themes include (but are not exhausted by) ‘information is power’, ‘spotlight on violence’, ‘gender and identity transgressions’, ‘genuine achievements’, ‘medieval or post-industrial’, ‘non-violence’, and community standards. Critical exchanges abound as participants ‘out’ their respective civic values and emphases pertaining to membership and constitution of online gaming communities. Early in the article Dr Cat expresses disappointment that discussion of the premise that information is power had been confined to the theme of information on how to hack the game to win an advantage: Running a game that isn’t conflict-oriented, I’m fortunate enough not to have to play the game of constantly trying to close loopholes that give players an advantage. The largest guild in our world is one dedicated to helping other players, and there are a number of user web pages with tips on how to better use the tools for building and scripting things in the game. So these types of information have value to the players also, and bring prestige to those who provide the information to others. I also know one player who probably knows more gossip about more people than just about anyone, and believe me, that kind of information brings power as well! Neil Anderson projects a critical focus into the realm of school pedagogy in ‘‘Mindstorms’ and ‘Mindtools’ Aren’t Happening: digital streaming of students via socio-economic disadvantage’. Against the current wave of concern about ensuring equitable access to information and communication technology (ICT) resources in schools, Anderson remarks that if there are grounds for believing that ICTs do not provide demonstrable benefits for students in terms of educational outcomes, then learners who are already disadvantaged in socio-economic, personal disability, cultural difference/marginality, or gender terms will not be further disadvantaged with respect to educational outcomes through inequitable access to ICT resources. Current research evidence is not promising. A recent survey reported by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted, 2004) in the United Kingdom found evidence for improved competence among school students in using ICTs but little transfer or application of this learning to other subject competence. In the USA, Wenglinski’s (1998) analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress data found that ‘professional development and higher order thinking are both positively related to academic achievement’ (p. 29) and ‘using computers for drill and practice, the lower order skills, is negatively related to academic achievement’ (p. 29). When he applied his findings to differential uses of ICTs in schools, Wenglinski (1998) concluded that: minority, poor, and urban students are less likely to receive exposure to computers for higher order learning, and poor and urban students are less likely to have teachers who have received professional development on technology use. Thus, where technology matters, there are significant inequities; only where technology does not matter have these inequities been successfully erased. (p. 29) Anderson reminds us that the total ‘social investment’ in the education of economically advantaged children far outweighs the effect of any compensatory funds directed to poor children (through such measures as putting more computers in low socio-economic status classrooms). For ICTs to stand any chance of being part of a mix that enhances educational outcomes for socially disadvantaged learners it will be necessary to employ effective models of harnessing new technologies to learning in the manner of ‘mindtools’ as described by David Jonassen (2000): i.e. ‘computer-based tools and learning environments that have been adapted or developed to function as intellectual partners with the learner in order to engage and facilitate critical thinking and higher order learning’. Unless and until this vision is realised, the use of ICTs in schools serving disadvantaged populations is likely to constitute just one further dimension of poverty – ‘a condition that helps maintain the vulnerability of already disadvantaged students to changes in workplaces, and that marginalizes them from the qualitatively different ways that advantaged groups use ICTs’. Dana Cammack’s article ‘No Straight Line: wrinkling binaries in literacy and technology research’ identifies and challenges some accepted binaries in literacy and technology research in the context of exploring the complex, multifaceted nature of literacy practices using a hypertextual multimedia study environment (MSE). Cammack argues that binarised thinking impedes nuanced understandings of literacy and technology, and shows how this plays out in a graduate university course in communication and technology at a private East Coast university in the USA. The course employed a mix of ‘traditional’ texts (books, book chapters, and photocopied articles) and the MSE, among other online texts, to explore reading and the emergence of print as part of the history of communication. MSEs are developed around particular texts – books, speeches, and others – and augmented with a variety of visual, aural, and linguistic texts. The MSE in the study centred on Salman Rushdie’s book Midnight’s Children. Formal coursework required participants to read the first 100 pages of Midnight’s Children, the novel, go through the MSE related to those pages, and then write about and compare the experiences of reading the book and the MSE as two different experiences. The professor framed the course from the outset in terms of conventional reading and online reading being qualitatively different, and this was reinforced in the coursework. Focusing on this binary, Cammack documents how student behaviour actually belied this framing assumption (for example, they engaged with the MSE in predominantly paper and pencil ways), and how the students consistently fought against their concrete experiences of reading to preserve the reading/reading online binary that had been served up to them. Aharon Aviram & Deborah Talmi address ‘The Impact of Information and Communication Technology on Education’ in terms of what they see as ‘the missing discourse between three paradigms’. They develop a matrix for analysing texts concerned with ICT and education. The matrix comprises seven approaches to the computerization of education on one axis and five attitudes to the computerization of education on the other. Applying the matrix to a sample of texts Aviram and Talmi identify and describe three clusters of ‘perspectives, mind-frames and policies towards ICT and education’ and present these as paradigms that differ on ‘the most basic ways’ of approaching the merger of ICT with education. They classify these paradigms as the ‘technocrat’, ‘reformist’, and ‘holistic’, respectively. The remarkable thing about these paradigms, from the authors’ standpoint, is that there is no discussion across them. From a scientific perspective this constitutes an anomaly, since ‘when there are three competing theories in a scientific field, a discussion between their upholders is to be expected’. Not only do proponents of the different paradigms fail to engage with the others, they seem not even to be aware of them. This, for Aviram and Talmi, creates a major impediment to the progressive development of the field of ICT and education. For progress to be made, they conclude: It is vital that we examine the fundamentals of the process of introducing ICT to education, expose the basis of the different views that have guided this process until now, and encourage an ongoing rational and critical discussion among them. In order to make well-founded implementation decisions in the field, we must initiate a rational discourse between the different theories, and form a model for ICT introduction that would reflect the state of the art in the field. This issue concludes with an interview with Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis on the theme of their ongoing political-educational project which encompasses holding international conferences, investigating modes of production of meaning in the context of the information society and the knowledge society, and engagement with school as a key space for a society’s ‘big ideas’. The interview traverses a raft of critical themes. Of particular interest for e-learning is their account of what is distinctive about the digital era – the digitisation of texts – and of what is erroneous in conventional accounts of the ‘new’. They reject the popular representation of the ‘new’ in terms of the virtual, the hypertextual, and so on. There is nothing new about the virtual, they argue, since written texts – particularly since the advent of print – ‘were really designed to be about non-immediate experience…The whole experience of written text in modernity is the experience of the virtual [and] the ‘virtual’ of the digital world is just another version of that same, modern thing’. Likewise, there is nothing new about the hypertextual, since that began with print in the fifteenth century, and with the idea that texts have referents: Modern texts never have beginnings and ends. The referents are either literal citations or bibliographical apparatuses or even literary allusions…Why would we need a table of contents except for non-linear readings? It is because we want to go straight to chapter 6. Why would we have an index for anything other than a non-linear reading? So in fact some of the most fundamental apparatuses in the information architecture of modern printed text are non-linear. Printed texts can point in a hypertextual kind of way to the universe of associated texts. These apparatuses are all built on the assumption that a singular reading of a text is the exception more than the rule. Novels are read in a relatively linear way, typically, but most other text is not. For what is distinctive they look elsewhere and, specifically, to three places. The first comprises the shift in fabrication or manufacturing processes that occurs between the print mode and the digital mode. For example, whereas print involves mark up for ‘a single visual rendering’, digital text production employs ‘structural and semantic mark up’ for multiple renderings, which ‘allows the same text to go to typesetting for print, it allows you to render this to a screen as HTML, it allows you to put it on a mobile phone or PDA, it also allows you to listen to it through voice synthesis’. The second distinctive feature involves the reduction of the ‘elementary particle of composition of represented textual meaning’ from the level of characters to ‘something below the character level’: hence, ‘You click for ‘A’ and you click for red. Text and image are made on the same plane’. This has profound implications for how meaning is carried and received, including ‘a turn away from the dominance of alphabetic language {and] away from privileging isolated written language, and a turn towards the visual’ (which in a global context where different languages are not mutually intelligible assumes great communicative significance). The third shift concerns the growing arbitrariness of natural languages at the level of interactions that are mediated by digital technologies. In a transaction like face-to-face banking we have to deal with forms and persons operating in a particular natural language (or, in some places, maybe two or three languages). The natural language interface is all-important. In a machine transaction, however, ‘the natural language surface is…arbitrary’, because the functions (e.g. deposit, withdraw, check balance, etc.) have been built into ‘semantic tags’. What is all-important are the semantic tags that operate beneath the visual representation. These are what carry the meaning. The implications of this for e-learning are massive, since the two conceptions of what is new and distinctive amount to different mindsets. One will focus our attention on how to make the non-immediate seem as immediate as possible, and how to juggle hyperlinks to facilitate productive reading paths. The other, however, will focus our attention on how to manage meaning in an increasingly meta-analytic, multimodal and multilingual universe. Colin
Lankshear References |
| The Technical Codes of Online Education |
| VIEW FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
| This article addresses an impasse in debates about online education in university education. One side presents a story of the progressive development of technology as it is applied to the organisation of higher education, leading to pedagogical advances and to the new forms of administration required for the realisation of the technology’s full potentials, both pedagogical and economic. The other side views online education as a lever of neoliberal reform that extends to the university a capitalism that is now digital, global, and knowledge-based. Both sides of the debate share the same underlying philosophy of technology, according to which technology is a fait accompli with which the university must comply or which it must reject out of hand in defence of traditional academic values and priorities. The authors argue that critical theory of technology offers a way to redress this impasse by providing a philosophical orientation capable of widening the debate over online education and university restructuring through its emphasis on the dynamics of technological design and development as social and political processes. They examine the case of an early experiment in educational computer conferencing, drawing significant conclusions from it about methodology and policy in the online education debate. |
| Games as Exchange: module 4 of RE:PLAY: Game Design + Game Culture |
| VIEW FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
| This article is excerpted, with the permission of the editors and the publishers, from an edited book published by Peter Lang Publishing in conjunction with Eyebeam (www.eyebeam.org), a not-for-profit new media arts organization in New York City. It reproduces one of the book’s four organizing ‘modules’ – Games as Exchange – which focuses on new kinds of social interaction made possible by digital gaming. The book grew out of an ideas exchange among participants involved in an online forum and live symposium discussing and debating game design and culture. The module reproduced in this article involves 15 of the 50 core contributors to the book as a whole, whose ideas were coordinated thematically and edited by Amy Scholder and Eric Zimmerman. The module is prefaced by Eric Zimmerman’s Introduction to the book as a whole. |
| ‘Mindstorms’ and ‘Mindtools’ Aren’t Happening: digital streaming of students via socio-economic disadvantage |
| VIEW FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
| This article considers the possibility that school-based uses of new technologies might actually exacerbate the educational disadvantage of already disadvantaged social groups – particularly, learners from low socio-economic status populations. It draws on some recent international studies that indicate how minority, poor and urban students may be less likely to receive exposure to computers for higher-order learning than their economically and socially advantaged peers, and to have teachers who have received professional development on technology use. Work by Papert and Jonassen, among others, is used to indicate principles and directions that attempts to integrate new technologies into pedagogy will need to observe if issues of educational disadvantage are to be addressed successfully. An example of an attempt to implement such principles and directions in the author’s own work is presented. |
| No Straight Line: wrinkling binaries in literacy and technology research |
| VIEW FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
| This article challenges some accepted binaries in literacy and technology research in order to explore the complex, multifaceted nature of literacy practices using a hypertextual multimedia study environment (MSE). Binary distinctions like literacy/illiteracy or online/offline are ‘wrinkled’ or complicated by introducing findings from an ethnographic study of the MSE in a graduate history of communication course. |
| The Impact of Information and Communication Technology on Education: the missing discourse between three different paradigms |
| VIEW FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
| Using a new methodological tool, the authors analyzed a large number of texts on information and communication technology (ICT) and education, and identified three clusters of views that guide educationists ‘in the field’ and in more academic contexts. The clusters reflect different fundamental assumptions on ICT and education. The authors argue that these clusters represent three different paradigms, which they term the technocrat, the reformist and the holistic. They further argue that despite the burgeoning literature on the merger of ICT and education, discourse between the three paradigms is surprisingly limited. Given the doubtful results of the computerization of education, they suggest that identification of these paradigms would promote an essential discussion, vital for better future policies. |
| Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis and Colin Lankshear. A Contemporary Project: an interview |
| VIEW FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
| The first two issues of E-Learning featured monographs by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, which they generously made available for publication. Both of these works, Designs for Learning and Text-Made Text, are artifacts grounded in a larger shared project to which the two authors have been committed throughout more than two decades of sustained intensive activity as academics and public intellectuals. This interview by Colin Lankshear pursues an insider view of this larger project and how it relates to e-learning as an emerging theme of the present historical juncture. |
© SYMPOSIUM JOURNALS |
