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International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning

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Situating e-learning: Accelerating precepts fromthe past

Susan Carter, Sean Sturm & José Luis González Geraldo

To cite this article: Susan Carter, Sean Sturm & José Luis González Geraldo (2014) Situatinge-learning: Accelerating precepts from the past, International Journal of Pedagogies andLearning, 9:1, 1-9, DOI: 10.1080/18334105.2014.11082015

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Copyright © eContent Management Pty Ltd. International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning (2014) 9(1): 1–9.

Volume 9, Issue 1, August 2014 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PEDAGOGIES AND LEARNING 1

Situating e-learning: Accelerating precepts from the past

SUSAN CARTER, SEAN STURM AND JOSÉ LUIS GONZÁLEZ GERALDO*The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand; *Universidad Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla-La Mancha, Spain

Abstract: E-learning entails a diff erent cognitive performativity from class or textual teaching and learning. It is critiqued through three case studies from lecturers working digitally in diff erent ways. Th e authors’ various challenges in shifting from the classroom to the ‘digitas’ illuminate the risk of interpassivity into which ‘users’ are easily tempted. Th ere are a few caveats about education’s headlong rush into e-learning. Th e paper details experiences of translating pedagogical philosophies and practical teaching methods from classroom to screen. Interrogating their teaching philosophies during this process led the authors to align e-learning with mediaeval mnemotechnics, spatially organised systems for structuring knowledge so that the learner develops holistically. In e-learning and mnemonics, spatiality and visual images are used as thinking devices. Placing e-learning on a vector with precepts from the past enables education’s core values to hold steady through the (sometimes discomforting) shift in cognitive processing and identity that ‘e-tivity’ demands.

Keywords: e-learning, e-tivity, social purpose of education, functioning knowledge, academic identity

E-learning is a promisingly disruptive teach-ing innovation, a seismic shift in human

cognition and communication. For many teach-ers, it is challenging. When academic kudos rests on text-based ways of teaching and learn-ing, we are not comfortable in the digital world, and with good reason: It requires us to question our pedagogy and change our academic identity. We build on a longstanding European tradi-tion of philosophical enquiry to scope some of e-learning’s (and e-teaching’s) implications. We place e-learning in the perspective of a contin-uum. For academics, e-learning’s disruption to teaching methods is both challenging and full of potential. As post-Bologna Europe realigns its modus operandi from the top down, e-learning shifts pedagogical practice on the ground, the domain of teachers.

Senior management often encourages academ-ics to step into e-learning in the belief that ulti-mately it will save money: Once sites are built, successive hordes of students can be herded through them with no extra cost in time. Educators assume e-learning to be eff ective for incoming students, who arrive as digital natives, their smart-phones frequently in their hands. However, in practice, e-learning often defaults to information ‘transmission,’ delivery rather than engagement (Miller & Sellar, 1985, p. 17), a model of teach-ing long abandoned in favour of ensuring student

engagement. Transmission delivery at best leads to knowledge about the topic; educationalists rec-ognise that teaching should aim for ‘functioning knowledge’: Learning how to do and to be rather than learning about something (see Biggs, 2003). Education is not about learning something you did not know, but becoming someone you have never been. E-learning requires new ways of doing and being.

Students need to acquire citizenship savvy in a world where education has gone global; increas-ingly the boundaries between east and west, south and north, collapse as they are crossed by digital connections. As Bruff ee (1999, p. 47) points out, ‘Th e importance of helping … students learn to negotiate cultural boundaries between sociocul-tural communities as well as among substantive knowledge communities is that for the rest of their lives students will be unable to avoid meet-ing people from alien communities’ (Bruff ee, 1999, p. 47). Th e exercises conducted in the European Higher Education Area have infl u-enced the rest of the world – this ‘area’ is thus an unbounded one. Many students and academ-ics develop as global and glocal citizens, exploit-ing the wired interconnectivity of technology to belong in more than one geographical location. Elsewhere there have been arguments made that the climate of Bologna process reforms is ideal for radical improvements in pedagogical practice

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generic doctoral skills sessions, the prompt which highlighted for us the practical and pedagogical implications of shifting medium. Th e next is the use of social networks to stimulate teaching and learning conversations. Finally, a stage one writing course that required students to engage in building the material digitally adds another learning experi-ence from a third teacher, one based on doing. In each e-learning case, we became aware that iden-tity, the being we perform within academia, has to shift as the medium of our teaching changes.

We begin by reviewing some literature from the scholarship of teaching and learning. Next we build our vector from the past. Th en we present our three case studies, and fi nally critique our digital teaching in the context of the literatures past and present.

A DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION: E-LEARNING

Before venturing into e-learning, we were familiar with the intuitive interaction (‘intuition-in-action’ Johansson & Kroksmark, 2004) of the classroom. Brookfi eld (2006) describes teachers looking for patterns recognisable from past experience, for aff ective cues and diagnostic clues: ‘we … call on our own intuition. We attend to the instinctive analyses and responses that immediately suggest themselves as relevant’ (p. 7); by doing this we can reach students who are diverse. Keeping teaching truly responsive and relevant, truly engaged with students, enables transformative learning (Corno & Mandinach, 1983). Clearly, although our teaching material may be available digitally 24/7, as embodied mortal teachers, we are not.

For us, this implies that to match the benefi ts of interactivity in face-to-face classroom work, e-learning must be performative, rather than informative. We view performativity positively: As critical, creative, ontological and social (see Butler, 2010, p. 147; Butler, 1997). Curiously, e-teaching and e-learning is literally rather than linguistically performative (for linguistic per-formativity, see Austin, 1962). Wikipedia sets a model of performativity: It informs us, in the manner of an encyclopaedia, but when as good academic citizens we edit or add to it, we perform it: We wiki. Promisingly, we can encourage our students to engage and contribute like this, devel-oping critical judgement as they do so.

(Carter, Fazey, González Geraldo, & Trevitt, 2010; González Geraldo, Trevitt, & Carter, 2011). We take these arguments into the area of digital teaching.

Th is paper is built around three case studies of our own digital teaching. Working through technology changed our teaching. Our changes made us more conscious of the deeper issues behind teaching and learning. We consider some European thought on cognition, new knowledge, identity and social engagement, intending that the past might better show where this discourse vec-tor projects to teaching of the future. Placing this refl ective paper in the alignment with a traditional discourse enables us to sidestep e-learning’s incli-nation to the transmissive language of information science: Of users, usage, usability (see Tsakonas & Papatheodorou, 2006), or of information-seeking and aff ordances (see Pirolli & Card, 1999).

We argue that it is not enough for lecturers to shift material from print media to the screen: Th e challenge is to identify the shifts in cognition and create learning tools that maximise learning in new dimensions. Technology allows teachers to pre-package their material for learners to browse. However, true learning, engagement, is not assured (Marcum, 2006, pp. 65–67) and, in fact, risks being undermined. Nor is it always true that young students will happily adapt to e-learning; just as lit-erate students can baulk at handling printed text, digital natives may not want to be thrown bundles of material electronically. And sites can’t be devel-oped quickly if they are to be truly eff ective: In fact, the digital world is time expensive. We are quite sure that we want to become expert teachers within the digital medium, but are aware of the challenges. Our experience of e-teaching sent us ranging through ways of conceiving e-learning as prompting ‘radical changes in the virtual world,’ changes that will infl uence communication and social behaviour (Kurubacak & Yuzer, 2011). Here we itemise some of the limitations and risks that are likely to trouble the process of e-learning and we emphasise the potential that a rethinking of pedagogy off ers academics.

Th ree case studies underpin our consideration of the pedagogical implications of going digital. One is the construction of a digital version of

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that the self is a social construct, arising out of a ‘social process [of ] interaction,’ of ‘co-operative activities.’ ‘Self is thus constituted by this social, refl exive, dialogic, and ongoing internal commu-nication process, as part of an unfolding trajec-tory of becoming a person’ (Mead, summarised by Chee, 2011, p. 106). Discourse on the doctorate acknowledges that PhD, learning produces the thesis, but also the person, the new researcher (Park, 2007). At each level, graduate students themselves similarly embody the product of their learning. E-learning’s pedagogy needs to con-nect with the challenge of teaching for student self-development.

E-LEARNING AND ACADEMIC IDENTITY

As academics in a secular context, it is easy for us to lose sight of any higher purpose in our research. Early discourses on pedagogy stressed that educa-tion should further a divine purpose (see Yates, 1966, pp. 43–45). Augustine (1838, p. 192; 11.18) sees ‘divine purpose’ as served by cogitare, that is, ‘thinking’ as ‘collecting’ and ‘recollecting.’ Secularisation of the idea of ‘soul’ translates it into a more usable contemporary educational construct: ‘the mediaeval concept of “soul” bears a reasonably close relationship to the modern “sense of identity” particularly as that term func-tions in academic criticism’ (Carter, 2009, p. 65). Augustine, Aquinas and others theorised the inter-relationships of body, mind and soul. Th eir mediaeval mnemonic theory – how to develop your spirituality through learning – aligns sur-prisingly well with digital communicative prac-tice. Augustine describes memory as a ‘great receptacle’ (1838, p. 190; 10.13–14), with ‘secret and inexpressible windings’ wherein items might ‘be forthcoming, and brought out at need.’ Th is aptly describes digitalia: Wikipedia has hyper-links leading to more hyperlinks, like a labyrinth of information. Building an e-learning site entails designing the labyrinths layout, like a magus fi gure designing a future exploratory experience for your potential students. As we trawl through digital labyrinths, we are thinking, communicat-ing and learning in accordance with mediaeval mnemonics: Th e rhizomatic network of the ‘digi-tas’ (Samuels, 2008). On refl ection, we propose

Only by enabling intelligent navigation, dis-cernment, and two-way communication can e-learning be truly interactive … and potentially ‘transformative’ (Miller & Sellar, 1985). Th rough the action of ‘e-tivity’ (Salmon, 2002), ‘deep learn-ing’ (Marton & Säljö, 1976), the acquisition of functional knowledge may occur. Transformative deep learning is what education contributes to society through enabling people to become more logical, ethical and refl ective within their social situation. Institutional graduate attributes express an end product; some investigation (for example, Barrie, 2007) shows that academics have a patchy and heterogeneous understanding of whether (and how) it might be possible to actively teach the attributes that we fl ag up on our institutional self-description.

E-learning can help or hinder this kind of transformative learning, dialogic, authentic and social. It is disconcerting that people are mak-ing decisions about e-learning for whom it is entirely foreign, or through the wrong channels. Some institutions allow e-learning to be cap-tured by IT experts and librarians, risking that e-learning reverts to a transmission model of learning, focussed on delivering information in a one-way fashion: By download (one-way) and non- conditionally (one-way only). E-learning’s potential, though, is that it can also be liber-ating: Anti-elitist like Wikipedia, and perhaps disturbingly so for some academics (Knight & Pryke, 2012).

E-LEARNING EDUCATION’S PERSONAL AND SOCIAL DIMENSION

Education makes signifi cant contribution to social values, ethical and aesthetic (about what is good and what is beautiful). Th e doctoral stu-dents of our fi rst case study are in the process of constructing the academic identities that they will perform as fully fl edged researchers, likely to be leaders in their communities. In an increasingly digital environment, their leadership and iden-tities are likely to be built somewhat diff erently from previous generations.

Academic identity is built within the frame-work of discipline expectation, in alignment with Mead’s (1934, p. 164) early recognition

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that the development of e-learning is similar to mediaeval understandings of mnemonics as a route to a stronger identity.

Pedagogical changes, we insist, must similarly remain attentive to the values, that is to say, axiology, of education to society. Writing of mnemonic prac-tices, Carruthers (2008) emphasises that these were ‘not considered to be merely practical know-how, a useful gimmick that one might indulge in or not (rather like buying better software). It [should be] co-extensive with wisdom and knowledge’; in fact, it ought to be ‘morally virtuous in itself ’ (p. 88). Although these are problematically large terms, we feel comfortable applying them to our teaching ped-agogies: Teaching, including for e-learning, involves ‘identity work:’ it cannot ignore values. Th e gradu-ate attributes that are posted by institutions (and investigated for the slippage between rhetoric and teachability (Barrie, 2007; Gilbert, Balatti, Tuner, & Whitehouse, 2004, etc.) in a signifi cant part relate to values: E-learning is one dimension where issues of equity through international accessibility become possible in practice.

THREE CASE STUDIES

Susan’s story: A generic support site for doctoral studentsTh e construction of an electronic version of fi ve sessions from a generic support programme for doctoral students, the Doctoral Skills Programme (DSP), meant building for teaching which is optional and not enfolded within a departmen-tal course. Th is across-campus teaching sits within a developing fi eld (see Carter & Laurs, 2014; Hinchcliff e, Bromley, & Hutchinson, 2007). Nobody is obliged to follow through the site. Despite feeling dubious about how much it would be used in proportion to the time taken to build it, I was prompted to create the site by awareness of hundreds of part-time doctoral stu-dents on our campus, an increasing trend docu-mented elsewhere.

I was sceptical, though. Doctoral students at our New Zealand institution are various: In 2013, almost half of the intake was international. In classrooms, I could see who was there and cater for their needs, by considering culture, age, gender, and comfort zones. A website had to speak to a

widely variant audience. For doctoral students who work alone there is sustenance in the interde-pendence of the DSP classroom; Bruff ee’s (1999, p. 267) effi cacious ‘nested’ communities of prac-tice recognition captures aspects of doctoral expe-rience within departments, disciplines, and the wider doctoral community. Some of this collegial sharing would need to be enabled electronically for part-time students unable to come to the classes.

Transforming pedagogy from face-to-face to virtual exchange was a concern for me as someone who works more happily with text and talk than with websites: I needed to learn more.

Milne and Dimock’s (2006) principles for e-learning pedagogy helpfully direct that e- learning should be:1. learner-centred,2. collaborative,3. innovative,4. accessible by diverse audiences (heterogeneous),5. sharing of best practice, and6. sustainable.

Most of these neatly fi tted my classroom peda-gogy, but ‘sustainable’ challenges me: Digital site maintenance seems to take me a great deal of time. Obliging site designing and building col-leagues advised and assisted in construction. Th ey added their e-pedagogy: A cycle that moved from:1. the assessment of student need, to2. design and3. use of the site, to4. feedback and5. refl ection, followed by6. design fi ne-tuning.

Th ey also suggested that we build in stages, beginning by: [1] putting handouts onto pages, gathering short video clips, adding links and per-haps exercises. [2] Th e second stage might include bloggy spaces for students to talk. [3] Finally, it might be possible to have a narrative fi lm show-ing student progress. In the same way, another col-league was a fi lm producer of educational videos, and knew that we needed clips shorter than 2 min-utes, and contributors who we had already primed up to deliver what we wanted. In an equivalence of making a homely classroom, he had contributors relaxed: Th ey came across as natural and authentic.

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Th e fi ve sessions complete with about 60 video clips from academic staff and recently completed doctoral students, with literature, and with links to useful sites was built over the space of 18 months and with funding from a Teaching Improvement Grant (NZD4,500.00) that paid an assistant. We are really pleased with it. Th e range of people who gave short video clips means that variations in terms of age, gender, and cul-ture are represented. It is an exquisite artefact exceeding my expectations. Student response to date has been positive. Nonetheless, it has been an expensive exercise.

José’s story: Th e course lecturer’s recognition of a hybrid identityTh inking about my teaching practice and the use of digital available systems, I fi nd it diffi cult to clarify their interconnectivity without expressing fi rst how I feel regarding my hybrid condition. Prensky (2001) made a well-known distinction between digital immigrants and digital natives, but there is also a rising stream of thought (for example, through JISC, 2011) that it is better to talk about visitors and residents. Th is framework assumes that sometimes there is someone who knows the place we are visiting better than we do, but the roles are interchangeable. Sometimes I have resident confi dence with the use of digital means (Moodle, for example) and other times I feel my students are residents and I the naïve visi-tor (in social networks, as example). Th ere is some irony in that often those who have lived with-out technology have to teach how to use a social network for academic purposes to those who are using it every 5 minutes. I think everyone is more or less hybrid, both visitor and resident depend-ing on the context of digital teaching and learning tools. Th e digital medium has a tendency to break down hierarchical boundaries, a tendency which could be developed.

I have few problems understanding and using the Internet resources; I used them in my under-graduate studies. But, on the other hand, maybe my time is passing. I see my students talk about worthwhile pages that I had not even noticed until that moment. Yesterday I was on the crest of the wave, I could handle the Internet without

problems, but now I am only confi dent in my little kingdom, basically, the land of Moodle.

Moodle is a robust website that allows you to do multiple things … maybe too many. With Moodle you can send an e-mail to one or more students, you can create forums, upload things, links, chats … even create your own Wikipedia! It is so powerful that I think it risks becoming a pedagogical trap for three reasons.

First of all, it seems that teachers must use all the potential that Moodle off ers us. Th e fi rst couple of years I used this platform I went crazy trying to do all I could in one course. I think I misunderstood the point in some way and believed that it was just to use those technologies. Learning took second place. I was intoxicated and overwhelmed. Th e light was so strong that I was blinded instead of helped.

Secondly, Moodle is an ad hoc tool which is closed and ‘non-natural.’ Using software we know, we are forcing our students to visit our domains. Th ey will learn how to use Moodle; they will use it; they will graduate; they will forget it …. If we want to focus our teaching techniques in our students we should visit their residence and learn how to use their tools: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn … whatever!

And last, but not least, we should be aware of the risk that we are investing all our digital teaching competencies in only one website. If it fails, all fails: Forums, document uploading, chats, Wikipedia’s … More and more, we are centralising our digital teach-ing competencies. Should our university change its contract with the platform, we would move into a new digital house, with the huge learning transition that it means. Having all-in-one makes our present easier but may jeopardise our future; it transforms us into isolated slower digital learners.

Technology is great, of course, but only if it is subdued to humanity. I am convinced that it is really easy to foster instruction through digital tools, but it is not so easy to foster education, nor sound teaching practice. Th e digital, as Plato’s cave, is only a reconstruction of the world … but some-times, in an alienating way, we mistake it for the world in itself. We lose the real world as we become entranced by the simulacrum. We should use the screen as a tool, not as a permanent residence. In the end, perhaps we are all just digital visitors – we

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need to keep our tickets to get back home, and stay clear about where our driving values lie.

Sean’s writing technologies blogMy own experience of blogging as a way to increase my scholarly ‘output’ led me to make blogging part of the assessment for a Writing Studies course: Writing Technologies, which I was co-teaching with Stephen Turner (Sturm & Turner, 2010). I designed and built a blog site for the course, using the Coursebuilder course devel-opment tool built by the Centre for Academic Development at the University of Auckland (Centre for Academic Development, 2012).

With Writing Technologies, we aimed to enable students to intervene in their own writing process by exploring the writing technologies they use to pro-duce their writing, and by refl ecting on writing as design and their writing as designed. Writing as design implies that the writer’s choice of writing technology (pen, typewriter, computer/tablet, mobile device, etc.) determines to a certain extent what they can write in terms of form and content. We traversed the history of the book, conceived as designed object, and explored how this history is thrown into relief by the digital text and other writing technologies, in particular, reading and writing – if those are good words for what we do now (‘construction’ Sturm & Turner, 2011, pp. 10–11; perhaps better defi nes our new ‘life on screen’ Turkle, 1995).

However, writing as design also implies writing as designed: Designed to aff ect its readers by certain means, in certain ways and to certain ends – in particular, in the academy, to give eff ect to certain institutional ends. For example, whereas writing in the academy – in particular, writing as a medium – is normally taken as writ (we all think we know what ‘academic style’ is, for example), we saw it as properly a designed response to social, insti-tutional and individual design-drives. Academic writing is no longer (nor was it ever, probably) hermetic, apolitical or ‘objective,’ especially not now that the academosphere is so permeable to the telematic, econometric forces of transnational capitalism. Such ‘design-drives’ demand that we teach and learn writing as design and designed.

So for the design of the blog site we used a group blog page (with posts and comments on

course readings) and other web 2.0 components (hyperlinks, images, videos, etc.) to build the page. We wanted students to feed back on and feed into the design of the course, by both co-creating the course content through the blog and creating their own content in response to the blog (‘co-construction’). Th is allowed the students and us to work up the course together in a more ‘netizen’-friendly and networked way (in part, because we were hardly experts in the kind of technologies at issue). It also exposed the process of knowledge-creation and - circulation, and encouraged students to bring to bear their own knowledge, academic and otherwise, on the content in scholarly ways. Th is process of co-construction was documented through course-work assessments that included writing in various media, including a critical–creative assignment in any medium; blogging; and an academic essay. All three assessments were designed to explore writ-ing as technology, as medium, as design: Students explored the protocols of writing in a university and the econometrics of teaching and learning (Sturm & Turner, 2011, pp. 9–14). Further, we intended that the site remain online as a record of the course and a public resource – with the side benefi t that students’ writing could be shared and publicly visible.

Such a process demanded that we explore and explain our ‘pedagogy as design.’ What we learnt was that our students as mostly – or supposedly – ‘digital natives’ (Bennet & Marton, 2010) had a diff erent sense of writing technologies and the web 2.0 than us digital ‘settlers’: Th eirs was more sophisticated but perhaps less critical than ours (it being easier for us to break the technol-ogy, perhaps, as happened when our server went down). Students were comfortable with the per-sonal, but not the pedagogical use of writing technologies: Th eir hyperliteracy was not fully literate, let alone critical or creative. Th ey were adept at digital chat, but no better at engaging in a critical scholarly way digitally than in text: Perhaps, even, their very familiarity with the Facebook genre was a handicap to them produc-ing the work we hoped for. We also learnt that it was just as easy for us to shut down learning as it ever was: If the fi rst response a blog entry

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was ours, that guaranteed silence – or, at the very least, anxiety.

As well students were very anxious about ‘breaking’ a familiar and institutionally sanc-tioned protocol like the academic essay, or sharing and creating their writing for others to read and, potentially, critiquing … let alone co-writing (or -creating). To help this, we did the assignments too, and in the same way that students did, spon-taneously and therefore colloquially. Th is sort of teaching is ‘modelling,’ not bringing in readymade knowledge or objects, but making knowledge – learning, by another name – in front of students and thereby showing learning happening, so stu-dents can learn how to learn.

If nothing else, we hope that students learnt two things: First, that they are always writing, even if they think most of that writing is trivial (texts, emails, posts, comments, etc.); and second, that, despite the best eff orts of ‘technicians’ (Microsoft, Apple or the Centre for Academic Development’s designers), technologies can be made ‘non- transparent’ (or broken), so that their functioning can be critiqued and turned to creative ends.

CRITIQUING OUR E-TEACHING REFLECTIVELY

Behind the surface level questions each of us con-fronted as we moved into digital teaching lay larger questions about cognition and identity. Building a course site involves pragmatic questions, but we also had to question the way we conceive of stu-dents’ learning and interaction with us. We felt very comfortable of how we handled this in the classroom; less so as to how we might get the social dimensions of teaching to work well digitally.

Of our three case studies, the generic doctoral site prompted the discussion behind this paper. As Susan’s website grew out in more directions, she was reminded of Carruthers’ work on memory cultures. First, most memory techniques relied on spatial systems in which ideas were secured with vivid images. Th ree elements of the classical art of memory from the Ad Herennium (Yates, 1966, pp. 3–5) are:

a. ‘a series of loci or places’ – viz, the (web)site;b. ‘the images by which the speech is to be

remembered’ – viz, its icons;

c. ‘moving in imagination through [the] mem-ory building’ – viz, its interactivity, that is, how we navigate and manipulate it.

E-learning, like memory craft, makes use of spatial elements (places), visual elements (images) and the way in which these are to be navigated and/or manipulated (interactivity) to enable a cognitive grasp on a large expanse of material.

Links within the site remind Susan of the mar-ginalia of mediaeval text, with recognition that in both cases the use of a secondary discourse head-ing off in another direction facilitated a deeper level of understanding. Th e network of linkages has the potential to enable hermeneutics at a meta-cognitive level. Crucially, mediaeval mem-ory systems were not about rote memory, but about the development of identity, and of ethi-cal values. Comparison of mnemonics raised the question of how could the soul of learning could be fi rmly established within the labyrinth of the digital site.

Building the doctoral site raised new questions for Susan, including:a. How should the links between things be most

logically presented visually?b. Would it be more intuitive to work top to

bottom or left to right? Or with a concertina structure?

c. What things should be nested together? How would overlaps be signalled?

d. What links were needed? How much is enough? How much is too much? (Th is was seen as important, since too much might be disincentivising, but more seemed to cater better for diversity.)

Th e price for time fl exibility was the intui-tive responsive potential of classrooms, where teaching in the generic doctoral programme ranges between the densely theoretical and the deeply practical. Student-led classroom detours activate interdependent support, shared strate-gies, senses of inclusivity and affi rmation. Susan feels she must get a place for students to talk to each other at diff erent places through each digital session with hooks that make it inevi-table that they will. Originally, the intention

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was that interactivity would come as stage two. Now, though, it seems pedagogically a sine qua non necessity.

Sean and José’s experiences point to the social dynamic of going digital. Individual identity depends on social context; this is strikingly true of academia, where students initially must aim for approval from examiners, and academics must meet the approval of peers and editors review-ing their publication, students evaluating their teaching, colleagues whose endorsement mat-ters, HoDs and senior management. Academia is a highly hierarchical social organisation, per-haps with some similarities to a mediaeval or Renaissance court.

Yet, whereas in the classroom, the teacher chooses the order and pace of discussion, students get more agency as they hop through our digital labyrinths in any order that seems most prom-ising to them. Th e risk might be that they hop too swiftly, if passive viewing is all the site off ers. As teachers improve their skills and build their understanding of the digital world, it has poten-tial as a medium that allows for the pleasure of play, that best prompt for learning. Th ere may be a better centring of teaching and learning within the student. Perhaps it requires a ‘using this site’ page explaining the meta-cognitive processes so that students can be more aware of their own learning, and of the teacher’s pedagogy. Or per-haps teachers will learn how to create interactive, multidimensional labyrinths where every route, each node, each edge, all holds intriguing learn-ing of diff erent kinds. Th e teaching environment could become a world that holds diff erent mean-ings, capturing the fullness of socially constructiv-ist teaching and learning.

We like the way that e-learning holds subver-sive potential to undo some of the time-honoured power inequalities of academia’s social context. Th e barriers between teachers and learners are helpfully collapsed as teachers fi nd that they know less than their students about the technology, even if they still know more about the critical and the-oretical dimensions of the academic world. Th at teachers and learners must move forward together in digital media creates a more truly fl uid kind of education. It may increase the likelihood of

independent learning, and a faster development of novice students into active researchers.

Th is shift into the digital space of social exchange is often challenging for teachers: What changes, and thus challenges, is the packaging for eff ective learning. Lack of skill, lack of confi dence, or being driven into technology by management can lead us to default to a transmission mode. And students often welcome this because it is easier for them to browse as passive receivers than to really engage. However, learning requires students to be active, to be and do. Th e ironic risk is that, in making mate-rial more fl exibly available 24/7, we diminish stu-dent engagement and learning, by making it easy for them to browse, skimming without engaging. Th ey can easily revert to type as passive learners – and they, unlike their teachers, can opt out and dis-engage. We cannot disengage, and nor should we want to. Th is challenging learning medium opens new territory for pedagogical research on how as a species we negotiate the construction of new knowledge. For researchers curious about what it means to be human, the step into the digital laby-rinth opens rich opportunity for enlightenment. Th e more we learn about digital engagement, the more likely it is that the digital labyrinths of teach-ing and learning are exciting places demanding and worthy of active engagement.

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© eContent Management Pty Ltd Situating e-learning: Accelerating precepts from the past

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Received 05 August 2013 Accepted 23 June 2014

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