E-Learning and Digital Media | |
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E-Learning and Digital Media (formerly E-Learning) Communications and information technologies or media not only diminish the effect of distance they also thereby conflate the local and the global, the private and the public, ‘work’ and ‘home’. Digitalization of learning systems increases the speed, circulation and exchange of knowledge, highlighting the importance of the digital archive, digital representations of all symbolic and cultural resources, and new literacies and models of text management and reception. At the same time the radical juxtaposition of text, image, motion and sound, and development of new information and knowledge infrastructures have created new learning opportunities in formal and informal areas, while encouraging the emergence of a global media network linked with a communications network together with the emergence a universal Euro-American consumer culture and the rise of edutainment media conglomerates. The question, therefore, of who owns and designs learning systems and media formats and content is of paramount political and philosophical importance. It is often claimed that digital technologies and mediatic forms hold great promise for improving the quality, flexibility and effectiveness of education. E-learning is presented as a new panacea offering unrestricted access, conquering distance, and providing the means for intercultural socialization and collaboration. Some theorists and practitioners argue that with the current ‘revolution’ in digital media and technologies, the concept and practice of the education itself will change radically. It is predicted that education institutions will offer a broader range of teaching and learning opportunities to provide for a much more diverse student body – or that they will cease to exist altogether. Learning experiences will become more closely tailored to the needs of individuals and groups: personalisation, customization and individualization are the policy watch words. Learning and teaching based on new mediatic and technical forms will boost the quality of education and overcome the traditional limitations of time and space associated with the industrial model of education. These new forms also will help to provide improved access and increased effectiveness, especially for students suffering disabilities or those from remote areas, and they will also shape the future of lifelong learning, offering flexible programmes of study to those with work or family commitments. In short, it is claimed that learning, teaching and educational institutions will become transformed in the new environment. Students will bring radically new styles of learning and communication to the classroom, and will expect related services and support from their educational providers. It is not surprising, then, that research occurring at the confluence of education and digital media and technologies – such as e-learning, instructional design and media education – has thus far had the effect of re-affirming long-standing assumptions about the nature of media, technology, human activity and of the interaction of humans with these forms – assumptions that have long been cast into doubt in other fields of research. New mediatic forms and contents, for example, tend to be measured against their more ‘authoritative’ print precursors, with research and teaching cast in terms of scrutiny and critique. Technical progress, as another example, is typically seen as single-handedly ‘impacting’ educational practices, and human action is similarly understood as fundamentally rational, rule-bound and thus predictable. These understandings have been contradicted by the complex unpredictability of technical, social, economic and educational continuities and transformations, which defy reductive explanation or predictive calculation. The challenge remains, then, for research and practice in fields like media education to be brought into closer contact with ongoing developments in theory, as well as to reflect rapidly developing social and technical practices and configurations. The study of educational technologies and media literacies needs to encompass the cultures, discourses, and experiences co-emergent with related practices, and to draw more deeply from a range of disciplines, including theoretical psychology, sociology, history, politics and philosophy. This journal takes up this challenge by exploring the ways that different disciplines and alternative approaches can shed light the study of technically mediated education, pose new questions and offer new answers for these fields. The change of the title of the journal for 2010 from E-Learning to E-Learning and Digital Media is expressive of this new and emphatically interdisciplinary orientation, and also reflects the fact that technologically-mediated education needs to be located within the political economy and informational ecology of changing mediatic forms. |
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