E-Learning

ISSN 1741-8887

Volume 3 Number 1 2006

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

SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE
Learning in the Digital Age: papers from the second Ideas in Cyberspace Education symposium
Guest Editors: SIÂN BAYNE, RAY LAND & MARTIN OLIVER

Part 2

Editorial, pages 1‑3
Annamaria Carusi. Power and Agency in Online Text-based Collaborations, pages 4‑15
Siân Bayne. Temptation, Trash and Trust: the authorship and authority of digital texts, pages 16‑26
Julian Cook & Neil Jacobs. Risky Discussions, pages 27‑36
Andrew Ravenscroft & Simon McAlister. Digital Games and Learning in Cyberspace: a dialogical approach, pages 37‑50
John Cook & Ann Light. New Patterns of Power and Participation? Designing ICT for Informal and Community Learning, pages 51‑61
Norbert Pachler & Caroline Daly. Professional Teacher Learning in Virtual Environments, pages 62‑74
Rachel Ellaway, Michael Begg, David Dewhurst &Hamish MacLeod. In a Glass Darkly: identity, agency and the role of the learning technologist in shaping the learning environment, pages 75‑87
Kim McShane. ‘Sending Messages to a Machine’: articulating ethe-real selves in blended teaching (and learning), pages 88‑99
Ray Land. Paradigms Lost: academic practice and exteriorising technologies, pages 100‑110
Bruce Douglas Ingraham & Shirley May Ingraham. eQuality: a dialogue between quality and academia, pages 111‑121

CALL FOR PAPERS
Papers are invited on the theme Educational Syntheses: the growth of online learning in early childhood teacher education to be edited by Andrew Gibbons, pages 122‑123
DOI: 10.2304/elea.2006.3.1.122 VIEW FULL TEXT

Part 1 of this special issue was contained within Volume 2 Number 4 2005

Editorial

DOI: 10.2304/elea.2006.3.1.1

This edition of E-Learning completes the special double issue of papers selected from the second ICE symposium (Ideas in Cyberspace Education) held in Cumbria, England in February 2005. The ICE symposia seek to provide a space in which the cultural, political and symbolic dimensions of online learning might be explored from a range of theoretical perspectives. Papers in Part 1 of the double issue drew attention to themes of cultural diversity and internationalisation, identity, affordance and presence in contexts that included computer games, weblogs, e-portfolios and three-dimensional avatar worlds. The papers presented here complement those of the previous issue, revisiting some of these themes while extending the discussion to include questions of power and agency, collaboration, authorship, risk and the carnivalesque.

In the opening work Annamaria Carusi takes up several of these themes. Her perceptive analysis shows how power works in dialogue. She points out that, through fostering specific forms of learner subjectivity to address economic imperatives, collaborative learning online can have a coercive as well as an empowering tendency. Partly because online learning is a domain which is still relatively immature, with its conventions, rules and procedures still emergent, and partly because of its predominantly textual nature, the power practices of online collaborations remain unclear. This is particularly so in relation to sincerity conditions and the interpretation of the intentions of participants. Trust between online collaborators becomes a salient matter. She argues for a ‘critical collaborativism’ that might clarify the ‘semantic, personal and ethical commitments’ that are made in online (textual) settings and which might mitigate the potentially coercive aspects of collaboration.

The nature of online text is pursued from a different perspective by Siân Bayne. Her article addresses the changing nature of authorship and authority within digital environments. In a richly illustrated analysis, drawing on empirical findings from interviews with learners and teachers, she reveals levels of discomfort and resistance within electronic text when questions of authority, legitimacy and trust arise. Her respondents prefer the reassurance of ‘the figure of the known and knowable author’, familiar from print-based culture, as a means of guaranteeing authenticity and reliability. Digital text tends to be viewed by the majority of these respondents as non-legitimate within academic discourse. In her exploration of forms of digital authorship, she points out that this unease appears to stem from the ‘mobilised’ nature of digital text, which renders it fluid and unstable, open to repeated circulation and potential transformation by a vast online readership. However, she identifies this incursion of the digital upon the analogue as an arena where ‘new, and radical, possibilities for authorship’ might challenge long-established academic norms, opening them up to new ‘pedagogical and epistemological possibilities’.

Julian Cook & Neil Jacobs focus on the calculability of risk faced by learners when deciding whether to enter online discussion. Participation, both procedurally and in terms of the contribution offered, entails the risk of making mistakes. This, the authors argue, becomes particularly problematic when potential mistakes demotivate participants, or when the latter are unable to learn from them. As a means of factoring such risk into the design of online learning, the authors use models of risk assessment and decision analysis to offer a helpful matrix approach for assessing the motivational cost/benefit equation of participation for students. Their own use of this approach indicates that learners faced a large perceived risk in posting a message to the discussion board, seriously compounded by ‘genre confusion’ in that they did not know what rules to follow when interacting online.

The subsequent three pieces are concerned in different ways with characteristics of digital environments that might foster a higher degree of engagement amongst participants. Andrew Ravenscroft & Simon McAlister describe their ‘dialogue game’ approach to online learning which seeks explicitly to ‘link game-playing activity to the development of generic dialogical and reasoning skills’. Their empirical findings suggest this dialogue-based game-playing approach enhances participants’ conceptual understanding and their collaborative capacity. They have designed ‘a socio-cognitive tool’ (InterLoc) as a mediating artefact to provide the necessary scaffolding for educational dialogue games.

John Cook & Ann Light assess the role that online learning might play in the establishment of a more inclusive society. They contemplate the changed patterns of power and participation that might be necessary to allow a much broader social range of participants to benefit from online learning in useful ways. They draw on empirical findings to assess the design implications for digital environments if they are to engage a more inclusive spectrum of users in ways that could both motivate and empower them.

In their contribution Norbert Pachler & Caroline Daly study the responses of professional teachers as participants within formal development programmes as they encounter the digital environment as unfamiliar terrain. The expectation of collaboration and interdependence is often at odds with participants’ prevailing notions of individual autonomy, ‘self-referential practices’ and more narrowly psychological perspectives of learning. The authors describe how the process of ‘putting the self online’ in relation to specific professional phenomena can radically develop teachers’ professional self-awareness. The textual representations of self required by the programme form part of a complex process of self-disclosure. This entails negotiation of delicate boundaries between safety and risk and can occasion important ontological shifts and ‘multiple transformational processes’ in relation to teacher identity.

The article by the Edinburgh team of Rachel Ellaway, Michael Begg, David Dewhurst & Hamish MacLeod also addresses issues of professional identity and agency but within a different community. Here the focus is on ‘the power and responsibilities of learning technologists and the ways that they affect the teaching and learning environments around them’. A typology of learning technology services is presented distinguishing between distal, proximal and atomic provision. The proximal pattern is advocated, in which technologists are members of, and work to support, a single and relatively homogeneous community. This can offer a viable and ethical approach, emphasising alignment and accountability, though always with the risk, given its community location, of parochialism and sectarianism. The authors offer case studies and interview analyses from proximal provision and recommend a loosely coupled code of practice which would not stifle the creativity of learning technologists with over-regulation, and an ethical and critical dimension to their practice to inform professional judgement in complex scenarios (such as whether to support a dysfunctional learning environment).

Issues of risk and identity converge again in Kim McShane’s study of why ‘technology-confident lecturers had all retained face-to-face teaching practices at the core of the student learning experience in their mixed-mode (blended) subjects’. She examines such resistance, in terms of affective and ontological factors, through the use of self-ascribed metaphors which act like ‘discursive masks’. These metaphors, as her focus on a specific case study attests, serve to articulate teaching identities and reveal the interpellation of individual teachers within a nexus of discourse, positional power and particular value systems. In the case under discussion, for example, the sensual embodiment of the face-to-face environment is valorised against fears of ‘becoming ethereal’ online, or decentred and destabilised into some cyborg academic entity, ‘a hybrid man-machine – a blended teacher-machine’.

The remaining two pieces both play with literary allusions as a metaphorical means of theorising online learning a little differently. Both identify a shift from an earlier collegial or carnivalesque culture of higher education to one that is more hierarchical and bureaucratised and which is articulated through the surveillance of organisations. Both pieces revisit notions of authority and how power functions differently within the technologised university, with its ‘demand for explicit exteriorization of previously internalized principles and values’ (Ingraham & Ingraham). In his contribution Ray Land employs Milton’s Paradise Lost as an allegory for the way that virtual learning environments are used to exteriorise and render visible (and hence more calculable) the shadowy and transgressive ‘pandemonic’ spaces of disciplinary cultures. He locates this process within the current performative agendas of higher education and as part of the suppression of risk that comes with cultures of audit. Both of these pieces, however, point to the capacity of the panoptic gaze to undermine itself, and that of digital technologies, if not contained, to provide unlimited opportunities for unruly or ‘undisciplined’ communication.

Bruce and Shirley Ingraham amusingly and instructively exploit the contrasto, a medieval Italian dramatic form often used to depict domestic brawls or clerical quarrels. This provides, as they put it, ‘an eminently suitable format through which a married couple might explore the legalistic if not positively clerical tensions implicit in their professional life’. These tensions concern what they term the ‘eQuality gap’ that has arisen between academics and their managers as media-enriched representations of scholarly discourse have become available in both research and learning and teaching contexts. They return to the questions of dialogue and textual authority raised earlier by Annamaria Carusi and Siân Bayne respectively, pointing out that when it comes to the quality assurance of online environments there is an assumption that the traditional approaches of academics and quality managers alike will automatically accommodate e-learning. However the latter does not have ‘the implicit or explicit grounding of centuries of tradition and shared expectations’ characteristic of more conventional modes of learning. This leaves the boundaries for standard setting unclear and the potential alliances needed to develop whatever new eQuality standards might be required ‘culturally problematised’, in that academics don’t seem particularly enthused and the quality managers lack the necessary expertise.

As a fitting proof of concept to trial the possibilities for media enrichment through e-learning, which many of the commentaries here imply, we close with a streamed video enactment of the Ingrahams (aka Professor Punch and Judy) in mid-contrasto, raising their domestic and professional cudgels. We hope readers will enjoy, as we have done, the broad theoretical scope and contextual range of the articles presented within this special double issue, and the many epistemological and pedagogical issues to which they give rise. As guest editors we would like to record our indebtedness to our host editors at E-Learning for their unstinting support and their generous invitation to make the proceedings of the second ICE symposium available to a wider readership.

Siân Bayne University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Ray Land University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom
Martin Oliver London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, University of London, United Kingdom

Power and Agency in Online Text-based Collaborations

ANNAMARIA CARUSI University of Southampton, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/elea.2006.3.1.4

This article considers power in text-based collaborations and proposes that in order for criticality to be directed towards the power structures at play in the discourse of collaborations, the interpretive strategies of participants need to hold in the balance the explicit or overt intentions of those with whom they are collaborating, and the implicit and possibly unintended meanings of their utterances. The attention to intention that is required for the creation of a domain of shared understandings is, however, made more difficult by the text-based nature of online collaborations, which brings these collaborations into a space of overlap with non-intentionalist models of reading and interpretation.

Temptation, Trash and Trust: the authorship and authority of digital texts

SIÂN BAYNE University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/elea.2006.3.1.16

This article considers the question of the authorship of digital texts and their use by learners and teachers in higher education. It draws on the work of Foucault, in particular how his concept of the ‘author function’ is applied by Poster to the authorships of the digital age. From this theoretical basis, the article goes on to consider some examples of text in digital space, looking at how, specifically, hypertext, email, wikis and blogs each re-articulate the author in different ways. In the final section of the article, interviews with teachers and students in higher education are analysed in terms of the discourses they use in describing digital text and its use within academia. The article shows how interviewees demonstrated significant resistance to digital texts and authorships within academic practice, generally viewing the texts of cyberspace as somehow subversive and other to the true academic project.

Risky Discussions

JULIAN COOK & NEIL JACOBS University of Bristol, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/elea.2006.3.1.27

This article considers a hypothetical decision by a hypothetical learner about whether or not to participate in an online ‘discussion’, viewed through the lens of risk analysis. It begins with the premise that participation online is desirable but that it involves the participant in risk, a fact that needs to be acknowledged and taken into account in the design of online learning. The article refers to previous work done on understanding online interaction through discourse analysis, which found instances of confusion about the interactive rules (or genre) that were appropriate to the online interaction. The article argues that such an uncertainty may constitute an important risk factor which may affect online participation. The element of risk is then more fully examined through a table of risk analysis; notional risk values are ascribed to a number of risk factors facing the potential online participant, calculated according to the seriousness and probability of the risk. These are weighed against likely benefits and summed to give an overall risk score. This approach is proposed as a method of integrating research findings from a range of sources, providing pointers for future research and of identifying ways to reduce the risks of online participation.

Digital Games and Learning in Cyberspace: a dialogical approach

ANDREW RAVENSCROFT & SIMON MCALISTER London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/elea.2006.3.1.37

Currently there is considerable enthusiasm for exploring how we can apply digital gaming paradigms to learning. But these approaches are often weak in linking the game-playing activity to transferable social or conceptual processes and skills that constitute, or are related to, learning. In contrast, this article describes a ‘dialogue game’ approach to learning in cyberspace related to Wittgenstein’s notion of a ‘language game’ that seeks to explicitly link game-playing activity to the development of generic dialogical and reasoning skills that lead to improved conceptual understanding and collaborative knowledge refinement. This article initially discusses the current articulations of gaming as an approach to learning before justifying and describing the dialogue game approach the authors are currently adopting. This is followed by a summary of empirical evidence in support of this design paradigm and a desciption of a socio-cognitive tool called InterLoc that organises, mediates, structures and scaffolds educational dialogue games. The approach is demonstrated and the implications it holds for designing gaming or other types of educational interaction are then discussed in the context of existing and near-future possibilities within the evolving e-learning landscape.

New Patterns of Power and Participation? Designing ICT for Informal and Community Learning

JOHN COOK London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom
ANN LIGHT Queen Mary, University of London, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/elea.2006.3.1.51

The United Kingdom and other governments have demonstrated faith in information and communications technology (ICT) as a means of achieving a participative and inclusive society through various high-profile initiatives. It is also claimed that ICT or e-learning can bring about new patterns of power and participation for excluded learners. In this context, this article examines the following questions: What new patterns of power and participation are ICTs enabling through e-learning? And what else is needed for a participative and inclusive society? The article addresses the questions from two different perspectives. First, the authors look at the small but growing empirical base in the area of informal and community learning, including the description of a previously unreported study in this area. Second, they discuss what is required to design digital media that plug into the motivations of ‘real people’ in a way that empowers them. It is argued that we need a merging of interdisciplinary perspectives if we are to enable true power and participation for e-learners. Specifically, the authors illustrate how the careful design of ICTs can contribute to empowerment.

Professional Teacher Learning in Virtual Environments

NORBERT PACHLER & CAROLINE DALY Institute of Education, University of London, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/elea.2006.3.1.62

This article is based on qualitative empirical research into the ways in which teachers view their experiences as learners in the context of an online tutor group who are studying for the mixed-mode Master of Teaching degree at the Institute of Education, University of London. Data collected from a stratified sample of teacher participants is analysed according to themes which focus on the social and psychological dimensions of the e-learning experience. Embracing the collaborative potential of electronic discussion groups emerges as potentially problematic, and bringing about change in participants’ perception of the medium to facilitate their own learning and the learning of others emerges as a complex process. The teachers offer multiple and contradictory accounts of their online activities, and polarised conceptions of ‘autonomous’ and ‘collaborative’ learning are inadequate to describe their experiences. Conclusions indicate that participants adopt various degrees of (sub)conscious adaptation and resistance to the collaborative learning context. By drawing on Schwienhorst’s classification of learning perspectives in computer-assisted foreign language learning, the authors propose that participants exhibit ‘learning trajectories’ which can be identified in in terms of the differing relations that exist between the individual, the online texts they engage with and electronic peer discourse.

In a Glass Darkly: identity, agency and the role of the learning technologist in shaping the learning environment

RACHEL ELLAWAY, MICHAEL BEGG, DAVID DEWHURST & HAMISH MACLEOD University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/elea.2006.3.1.75

Learning technologies are becoming a common, and in many cases essential, component of the contemporary learning environment. As such, those who design, implement and control these encompassing technologies have emerged as major contributors to the success (or otherwise) of such systems. This article considers the power and responsibilities of learning technologists and the ways that they affect the teaching and learning environments around them. It does this by investigating, through semi-structured interview, the praxis of a learning technology group at the University of Edinburgh and relating this to professional issues for learning technologists in general. The article goes on to develop a typology of learning technology service provision based on the relationship between the learning technologist and the context in which their work is to be used. This is compared with interviews with practitioners, and a series of principles and recommendations is then developed. The thrust of these is that direct participation in the learning community is essential for learning technologists and that common codes of practice for learning technologists are required, both as a benchmark and as a framework by which professional practice can be measured and developed.

‘Sending Messages to a Machine’: articulating ethe-real selves in blended teaching (and learning)

KIM MCSHANE University of Sydney and University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

DOI: 10.2304/elea.2006.3.1.88

Teaching and learning online is one of several risky practices in higher education today that threaten to disfigure academics’ work and identity. For many academics, accustomed to the tempo and practices of face-to-face teaching, it threatens disorientation. In this article the author examines the teaching beliefs of a computer science lecturer, via the lens of his self-ascribed teaching metaphor (the Performer). Seb and other participants in the author’s research are grappling with new modes of pedagogical being – ‘blended teaching and learning’ – the structures and practices of which straddle the imprecise boundaries of live and asynchronous pedagogies. Why does the hybrid, blended academic choose and value ‘traditional’, on-campus face-to-face lectures and/or seminars over online modes? The prospect of becoming a machine – a cyborg academic, a tech(no)body teacher clearly troubles him. An early adopter and technology enthusiast, Seb nevertheless prefers the embodied riskiness of ‘real’ face-to-face teaching over the ‘ethereal’ uncertainty of online pedagogy.

Paradigms Lost: academic practice and exteriorising technologies

RAY LAND University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/elea.2006.3.1.100

Using Milton’s Paradise Lost as metaphor, this article examines shifting positions of authority, and the role of technology, in higher education practice. As higher education becomes caught up in the performative agendas of globalised market rationalism, technology is mobilised in a specific way which sits uncomfortably with disciplinary culture, making academics complicit in a potentially problematic fashion. Learning technology serves a process of exteriorisation, rendering academic practices visible and calculable, and more amenable to the influence of management, to the authority of organisation, and less to tradition and the authority of the discipline. Trust and the ability to live with uncertainty and risk are displaced by audit; critique gives way to domestication. The more shadowy, private collegium must be open to survey within the transparent administrative universitas. Yet these same technologies remain potential sites of disciplinary resistance, or ‘culture jamming’ through the spaces they make available for contestability and interconnectivity.

eQuality: a dialogue between quality and academia

BRUCE DOUGLAS INGRAHAM & SHIRLEY MAY INGRAHAM University of Teesside, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/elea.2006.3.1.111

This article has two objectives: to explore the changing power relationships within the quality management practices of United Kingdom higher education with specific reference to online learning and the role of learning technologists; and to explore some of the issues surrounding the potential to represent academic discourse through media other than conventional printed articles and, by so doing, open for discussion the potential conflict between the hierarchical power structure of academic publishing and the carnival of the academic internet. These objectives will be achieved through a ‘mini case study’ that reflects on the implication of representing some of the issues surrounding the emerging quality agenda through a video-mediated dialogue that can not, by definition, be included in the medium of academic print.

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