2 Issues in cyberspace education Ray Land and Siân Bayne Introduction The increasingly global use... more 2 Issues in cyberspace education Ray Land and Siân Bayne Introduction The increasingly global use of digital environments in education has intro-duced fundamental challenges to the ways in which we understand notions of identity, community and knowledge itself. Theoretical ...
Introduction to the Special Issue of Learning, Media and Technology: Critical Approaches to Open ... more Introduction to the Special Issue of Learning, Media and Technology: Critical Approaches to Open Education
Promises of ‘teacher-light’ tuition and of enhanced ‘efficiency’ via the automation of teaching h... more Promises of ‘teacher-light’ tuition and of enhanced ‘efficiency’ via the automation of teaching have been with us since the early days of digital education, sometimes embraced by academics and institutions, and sometimes resisted as a set of moves which are damaging to teacher professionalism and to the humanistic values of education itself. However, both the embrace and the resistance can be seen to be anchored in a humanistic orientation to the project of education which recent work in the theory of critical posthumanism draws into question. Working within the broad frame of critical posthumanism, this paper will revisit the notion of teacher automation in higher education, exploring how as teachers we might enact new, resistant ways of playing at the boundaries of the human and machine.
In recent years, ‘technology-enhanced learning’, or ‘TEL’, has become a widely accepted term in t... more In recent years, ‘technology-enhanced learning’, or ‘TEL’, has become a widely accepted term in the UK and Europe for describing the interface between digital technology and higher education teaching, to a large extent taking the place of other recently popular terminologies such as ‘e-learning’, ‘learning technology’ and ‘computer-based learning’. Yet there has been little critique in the literature of the assumptions embedded within the terminology of TEL: rather it has been adopted as an apparently useful, inoffensive and descriptive shorthand for what is in fact a complex and often problematic constellation of social, technological and educational change. This paper subjects the term to a deeper analysis, drawing on insights from critical posthumanism, science and technology studies and Biesta's critique of the ‘learnification’ of education. In particular, it foregrounds the instrumentalisation of technology enacted by TEL, explores some of the problematic links between TEL and the philosophy of transhumanism, and critiques TEL for failing properly to interrogate its own ontological biases. The paper suggests that we need to be more careful with, and more critical of, the terminology we adopt to describe and determine the field.
This paper takes a view of digital literacy, which moves beyond a focus on technical methods and ... more This paper takes a view of digital literacy, which moves beyond a focus on technical methods and skills in an attempt to maintain a broader approach that encompasses a critical view of the learning subject. In doing this, we consider socio-materialism and its relation to aspects of literacy theory. We anchor the discussion in a consideration of the ‘E-learning and Digital Cultures’ Coursera MOOC, which provided a tangible setting for theorising some of the practices of digital literacy differently. The profusion of multimodal artefacts produced in response to this course constituted a complex series of socio-material entanglements, in which human beings and technologies each played a constituent part. Two specific digital artefacts are analysed according to these terms. We conclude that socio-material multimodality constitutes a different way of thinking about digital literacy: not as representational practices, but rather as multifaceted and relational enactments of knowledge, specific to particular contexts and moments.
This paper considers how online, distance students enact the space of ‘the university’, in the co... more This paper considers how online, distance students enact the space of ‘the university’, in the context of the rise of distance education within a traditional, ‘elite’ institution. Aiming to provide insight into how students translate into distance the space of a
university which has traditionally had its basis in conventional on‐campus education, it locates itself within the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm (Urry 2007), drawing on four different kinds of social space delineated by Mol and Law (1994, 2001) in order to
analyse narrative and visual data generated with distance students at the University of Edinburgh.
The paper shows that the material campus continues to be symbolically and materially significant for a group of students who may never physically attend that campus. Distance students, we find, need their own version of the ‘spatial certainties’ of
bounded, campus space. Yet, in exploring the ‘new proximities’ of online distance education, we also argue that to define institutional and academic authenticity solely in terms of this bounded, ‘regional’ space is inadequate in the face of the other
topologies which also come into play throughout distance students’ accounts of what it means to be ‘at’ university.
This chapter uses two complementary perspectives from which to theorize and understand a particul... more This chapter uses two complementary perspectives from which to theorize and understand a particular example of online course design and its associated literacies. First, it describes an experimental, multimodal, fragmented online course in ‘E-learning and digital cultures’, designed to be taught on the open web. It then uses Foucault’s notion of heterotopia to consider how we might conceptualize this kind of usage of web ‘space’ within education. Next, it draws on theories of critical posthumanism to explore what happens to our notion of the learning ‘subject’ when we work within such a heterotopic space. Finally, having troubled the notions both of ‘subject’ and ‘space’, and reconceived them as an educational ‘assemblage’ or ‘gathering’ (Edwards, 2010), we extend the discussion into the kinds of literacies which emerge within such a territory. We consider first the notion of the ‘lifestream’ as an assessment form, and then move on to discuss examples of multimodal digital assignments as locations which challenge academic writing as representational.
Digital differences: perspectives on online education, Ed. Bayne, S. & Land, R., 2011
This paper takes a critical approach to a discourse still commonly applied in our discussions and... more This paper takes a critical approach to a discourse still commonly applied in our discussions and understandings of the relationship between practitioners in higher education and the new digital technologies – that of the distinction between the socalled
‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’. We critique this over-simplistic binary from a range of perspectives, highlighting its tendency to de-privilege the role of the teacher, its implicit alignment with an understanding of higher education as
market-driven and commodified, and its reliance on a series of highly problematic and dangerously deterministic metaphors. We end the paper with a call for a more carefully critical and nuanced understanding of the effects of new technologies on
the practices and subject positions of learners and teachers in higher education.
Abstract This paper presents some of the findings from a recent project that conducted a virtual... more Abstract This paper presents some of the findings from a recent project that conducted a virtual ethnographic study of three formal courses in higher education that use ‘Web 2.0’ or social technologies for learning and teaching. It describes the pedagogies adopted within these courses, and goes on to explore some key themes emerging from the research and relating to the pedagogical use of weblogs and wikis in particular. These themes relate primarily to the academy's tendency to constrain and contain the possibly more radical effects of these new spaces. Despite this, the findings present a range of student and tutor perspectives which show that these technologies have significant potential as new collaborative, volatile and challenging environments for formal learning.
This paper explores the possibility of an uncanny digital pedagogy. Drawing on theories of the un... more This paper explores the possibility of an uncanny digital pedagogy. Drawing on theories of the uncanny from psychoanalysis, cultural studies and educational philosophy, it considers how being online defamiliarises teaching, asking us to question and consider anew established academic practices and conventions. It touches on recent thinking on higher education as troublesome, anxiety-inducing and ‘strange’, viewing online learning and teaching practices through the lens of an uncanny which is productively disruptive in its challenging of the ‘certainties’ of place, body, time and text. Uncanny pedagogies are seen as a generative way of working with the new ontologies of the digital.
This paper brings together the theory of the uncanny as it emerges in cultural theory, with an un... more This paper brings together the theory of the uncanny as it emerges in cultural theory, with an understanding of the uncanniness and troublesomeness seen to be inherent in certain understandings of teaching and learning in higher education. Drawing on research into students’ experiences of learning in virtual worlds, it explores the sense in which teaching in such spaces materialises and extends the positive aspects of uncertainty, strangeness, disquietude and troublesomeness in online higher education.
"This paper is concerned with online museum education, exploring the themes of user-centredness, ... more "This paper is concerned with online museum education, exploring the themes of user-centredness, digitization, authority and control. Taking as its starting point the shift of focus in museum policy from the collection to the user-learner, it suggests that this movement from object to subject – this ‘de-centring’ of the
cultural institution – is further complicated by a fundamental change in the nature of the object, as a result of digitization programmes which transform material, ‘possessible’ artefacts into volatile amalgams of bits and bytes. The ability of users to take, manipulate, re-distribute and re-describe digital objects is, we
suggest, a primary source of their educational value. It is also, however, a source of difficulty for institutions as they come to terms with the changing patterns of ownership, participation and knowledge production we are experiencing as we move further into the digital age."
2 Issues in cyberspace education Ray Land and Siân Bayne Introduction The increasingly global use... more 2 Issues in cyberspace education Ray Land and Siân Bayne Introduction The increasingly global use of digital environments in education has intro-duced fundamental challenges to the ways in which we understand notions of identity, community and knowledge itself. Theoretical ...
Introduction to the Special Issue of Learning, Media and Technology: Critical Approaches to Open ... more Introduction to the Special Issue of Learning, Media and Technology: Critical Approaches to Open Education
Promises of ‘teacher-light’ tuition and of enhanced ‘efficiency’ via the automation of teaching h... more Promises of ‘teacher-light’ tuition and of enhanced ‘efficiency’ via the automation of teaching have been with us since the early days of digital education, sometimes embraced by academics and institutions, and sometimes resisted as a set of moves which are damaging to teacher professionalism and to the humanistic values of education itself. However, both the embrace and the resistance can be seen to be anchored in a humanistic orientation to the project of education which recent work in the theory of critical posthumanism draws into question. Working within the broad frame of critical posthumanism, this paper will revisit the notion of teacher automation in higher education, exploring how as teachers we might enact new, resistant ways of playing at the boundaries of the human and machine.
In recent years, ‘technology-enhanced learning’, or ‘TEL’, has become a widely accepted term in t... more In recent years, ‘technology-enhanced learning’, or ‘TEL’, has become a widely accepted term in the UK and Europe for describing the interface between digital technology and higher education teaching, to a large extent taking the place of other recently popular terminologies such as ‘e-learning’, ‘learning technology’ and ‘computer-based learning’. Yet there has been little critique in the literature of the assumptions embedded within the terminology of TEL: rather it has been adopted as an apparently useful, inoffensive and descriptive shorthand for what is in fact a complex and often problematic constellation of social, technological and educational change. This paper subjects the term to a deeper analysis, drawing on insights from critical posthumanism, science and technology studies and Biesta's critique of the ‘learnification’ of education. In particular, it foregrounds the instrumentalisation of technology enacted by TEL, explores some of the problematic links between TEL and the philosophy of transhumanism, and critiques TEL for failing properly to interrogate its own ontological biases. The paper suggests that we need to be more careful with, and more critical of, the terminology we adopt to describe and determine the field.
This paper takes a view of digital literacy, which moves beyond a focus on technical methods and ... more This paper takes a view of digital literacy, which moves beyond a focus on technical methods and skills in an attempt to maintain a broader approach that encompasses a critical view of the learning subject. In doing this, we consider socio-materialism and its relation to aspects of literacy theory. We anchor the discussion in a consideration of the ‘E-learning and Digital Cultures’ Coursera MOOC, which provided a tangible setting for theorising some of the practices of digital literacy differently. The profusion of multimodal artefacts produced in response to this course constituted a complex series of socio-material entanglements, in which human beings and technologies each played a constituent part. Two specific digital artefacts are analysed according to these terms. We conclude that socio-material multimodality constitutes a different way of thinking about digital literacy: not as representational practices, but rather as multifaceted and relational enactments of knowledge, specific to particular contexts and moments.
This paper considers how online, distance students enact the space of ‘the university’, in the co... more This paper considers how online, distance students enact the space of ‘the university’, in the context of the rise of distance education within a traditional, ‘elite’ institution. Aiming to provide insight into how students translate into distance the space of a
university which has traditionally had its basis in conventional on‐campus education, it locates itself within the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm (Urry 2007), drawing on four different kinds of social space delineated by Mol and Law (1994, 2001) in order to
analyse narrative and visual data generated with distance students at the University of Edinburgh.
The paper shows that the material campus continues to be symbolically and materially significant for a group of students who may never physically attend that campus. Distance students, we find, need their own version of the ‘spatial certainties’ of
bounded, campus space. Yet, in exploring the ‘new proximities’ of online distance education, we also argue that to define institutional and academic authenticity solely in terms of this bounded, ‘regional’ space is inadequate in the face of the other
topologies which also come into play throughout distance students’ accounts of what it means to be ‘at’ university.
This chapter uses two complementary perspectives from which to theorize and understand a particul... more This chapter uses two complementary perspectives from which to theorize and understand a particular example of online course design and its associated literacies. First, it describes an experimental, multimodal, fragmented online course in ‘E-learning and digital cultures’, designed to be taught on the open web. It then uses Foucault’s notion of heterotopia to consider how we might conceptualize this kind of usage of web ‘space’ within education. Next, it draws on theories of critical posthumanism to explore what happens to our notion of the learning ‘subject’ when we work within such a heterotopic space. Finally, having troubled the notions both of ‘subject’ and ‘space’, and reconceived them as an educational ‘assemblage’ or ‘gathering’ (Edwards, 2010), we extend the discussion into the kinds of literacies which emerge within such a territory. We consider first the notion of the ‘lifestream’ as an assessment form, and then move on to discuss examples of multimodal digital assignments as locations which challenge academic writing as representational.
Digital differences: perspectives on online education, Ed. Bayne, S. & Land, R., 2011
This paper takes a critical approach to a discourse still commonly applied in our discussions and... more This paper takes a critical approach to a discourse still commonly applied in our discussions and understandings of the relationship between practitioners in higher education and the new digital technologies – that of the distinction between the socalled
‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’. We critique this over-simplistic binary from a range of perspectives, highlighting its tendency to de-privilege the role of the teacher, its implicit alignment with an understanding of higher education as
market-driven and commodified, and its reliance on a series of highly problematic and dangerously deterministic metaphors. We end the paper with a call for a more carefully critical and nuanced understanding of the effects of new technologies on
the practices and subject positions of learners and teachers in higher education.
Abstract This paper presents some of the findings from a recent project that conducted a virtual... more Abstract This paper presents some of the findings from a recent project that conducted a virtual ethnographic study of three formal courses in higher education that use ‘Web 2.0’ or social technologies for learning and teaching. It describes the pedagogies adopted within these courses, and goes on to explore some key themes emerging from the research and relating to the pedagogical use of weblogs and wikis in particular. These themes relate primarily to the academy's tendency to constrain and contain the possibly more radical effects of these new spaces. Despite this, the findings present a range of student and tutor perspectives which show that these technologies have significant potential as new collaborative, volatile and challenging environments for formal learning.
This paper explores the possibility of an uncanny digital pedagogy. Drawing on theories of the un... more This paper explores the possibility of an uncanny digital pedagogy. Drawing on theories of the uncanny from psychoanalysis, cultural studies and educational philosophy, it considers how being online defamiliarises teaching, asking us to question and consider anew established academic practices and conventions. It touches on recent thinking on higher education as troublesome, anxiety-inducing and ‘strange’, viewing online learning and teaching practices through the lens of an uncanny which is productively disruptive in its challenging of the ‘certainties’ of place, body, time and text. Uncanny pedagogies are seen as a generative way of working with the new ontologies of the digital.
This paper brings together the theory of the uncanny as it emerges in cultural theory, with an un... more This paper brings together the theory of the uncanny as it emerges in cultural theory, with an understanding of the uncanniness and troublesomeness seen to be inherent in certain understandings of teaching and learning in higher education. Drawing on research into students’ experiences of learning in virtual worlds, it explores the sense in which teaching in such spaces materialises and extends the positive aspects of uncertainty, strangeness, disquietude and troublesomeness in online higher education.
"This paper is concerned with online museum education, exploring the themes of user-centredness, ... more "This paper is concerned with online museum education, exploring the themes of user-centredness, digitization, authority and control. Taking as its starting point the shift of focus in museum policy from the collection to the user-learner, it suggests that this movement from object to subject – this ‘de-centring’ of the
cultural institution – is further complicated by a fundamental change in the nature of the object, as a result of digitization programmes which transform material, ‘possessible’ artefacts into volatile amalgams of bits and bytes. The ability of users to take, manipulate, re-distribute and re-describe digital objects is, we
suggest, a primary source of their educational value. It is also, however, a source of difficulty for institutions as they come to terms with the changing patterns of ownership, participation and knowledge production we are experiencing as we move further into the digital age."
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Papers by Sian Bayne
university which has traditionally had its basis in conventional on‐campus education, it locates itself within the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm (Urry 2007), drawing on four different kinds of social space delineated by Mol and Law (1994, 2001) in order to
analyse narrative and visual data generated with distance students at the University of Edinburgh.
The paper shows that the material campus continues to be symbolically and materially significant for a group of students who may never physically attend that campus. Distance students, we find, need their own version of the ‘spatial certainties’ of
bounded, campus space. Yet, in exploring the ‘new proximities’ of online distance education, we also argue that to define institutional and academic authenticity solely in terms of this bounded, ‘regional’ space is inadequate in the face of the other
topologies which also come into play throughout distance students’ accounts of what it means to be ‘at’ university.
‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’. We critique this over-simplistic binary from a range of perspectives, highlighting its tendency to de-privilege the role of the teacher, its implicit alignment with an understanding of higher education as
market-driven and commodified, and its reliance on a series of highly problematic and dangerously deterministic metaphors. We end the paper with a call for a more carefully critical and nuanced understanding of the effects of new technologies on
the practices and subject positions of learners and teachers in higher education.
cultural institution – is further complicated by a fundamental change in the nature of the object, as a result of digitization programmes which transform material, ‘possessible’ artefacts into volatile amalgams of bits and bytes. The ability of users to take, manipulate, re-distribute and re-describe digital objects is, we
suggest, a primary source of their educational value. It is also, however, a source of difficulty for institutions as they come to terms with the changing patterns of ownership, participation and knowledge production we are experiencing as we move further into the digital age."
university which has traditionally had its basis in conventional on‐campus education, it locates itself within the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm (Urry 2007), drawing on four different kinds of social space delineated by Mol and Law (1994, 2001) in order to
analyse narrative and visual data generated with distance students at the University of Edinburgh.
The paper shows that the material campus continues to be symbolically and materially significant for a group of students who may never physically attend that campus. Distance students, we find, need their own version of the ‘spatial certainties’ of
bounded, campus space. Yet, in exploring the ‘new proximities’ of online distance education, we also argue that to define institutional and academic authenticity solely in terms of this bounded, ‘regional’ space is inadequate in the face of the other
topologies which also come into play throughout distance students’ accounts of what it means to be ‘at’ university.
‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’. We critique this over-simplistic binary from a range of perspectives, highlighting its tendency to de-privilege the role of the teacher, its implicit alignment with an understanding of higher education as
market-driven and commodified, and its reliance on a series of highly problematic and dangerously deterministic metaphors. We end the paper with a call for a more carefully critical and nuanced understanding of the effects of new technologies on
the practices and subject positions of learners and teachers in higher education.
cultural institution – is further complicated by a fundamental change in the nature of the object, as a result of digitization programmes which transform material, ‘possessible’ artefacts into volatile amalgams of bits and bytes. The ability of users to take, manipulate, re-distribute and re-describe digital objects is, we
suggest, a primary source of their educational value. It is also, however, a source of difficulty for institutions as they come to terms with the changing patterns of ownership, participation and knowledge production we are experiencing as we move further into the digital age."