Diversity, new technologies and new learning

Diversity, New Technologies and New Learning

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Mary Kalantzis

Chair of Education, Research and Innovation Portfolio

Research Professor, Globalism Institute

RMIT University, Australia

President, Australian Council of Deans of Education

Abstract

There is little doubt that ‘elearning’ is destined to become a larger part of the educational experience of all learners as the world moves into a phase that is widely, and perhaps too glibly at times, referred to as a ‘knowledge economy’ or ‘knowledge society’. Information and communications infrastructures are clearly a central part of this development, and not only from the point of view of preparing learners for a world of work where networked computers are pervasive, but also from the point of view of community participation, citizenship and learning with in the context of local and global diversity.

However, as always, monumental technological and social changes such as the digital revolution are deeply fraught. On the one hand, critics argue that they add yet another dimension to inequality in the form of the digital divide. They also rightly point to the fact that much of the dedicated educational material is lock step and highly individualised (one user/one screen), appearing to be innovative in the ‘dazzlement’ of the medium, whilst in fact representing pedagogies that are of dubious quality and which, whilst filling the learning space, do not represent effective or powerful learning.

On the other hand, a more optimistic literature points to the social and educational possibilities of the new information and communications technologies. They point to their capacity to galvanise communities of practice, handing some of the means of cultural expression and communication over from the expensive and highly centralised broadcast media of twentieth century modernity to smaller communities (websites, digital printing, mp3 music, digital video). Instead of being the recipients of transmitted knowledge (syllabuses, textbooks, ‘information’ resources), educational institutions might become places where teachers and learners develop site-based knowledge banks, and where traditional classrooms, dominated as they are much of the time by teacher talk, are replaced by open sites in which groups of learners work autonomously and collaboratively on knowledge projects within a structured ‘content management’ environment. The possibilities this opens up for recognising and effectively deploying diversity in the human - computer interfaces is significant.

This paper will address the challenges and opportunities presented by the new technology for meaning making and designs for learning within the context local and global diversity.

Diversity

The rapid pace of change and the phenomena of globalisation are transforming not only senses if identity but the way we do things – from learning to making products and services. There is both pessimism and optimism about the effects of the changes. The rapid movement of money, people, and ideas is challenging local communities and demanding new sensibilities and skills. Traditional institutions of learning were established in a time when national borders were more clearly defined and when learning and work were closely related to producing certain types of learners, workers and citizens for very specfically bounded contexts at the local level. This has now been rendered insufficient for living, working and expressing onself happily in the complex world that is emerging both at local and global levels. Over time, we have experienced different waves of understanding the role that diversity plays in learning and participation. We have moved from the idea that people who were different could not be included in mianstream jobs, education, politics and social participation as equals (exclusion); to the idea that perhaps, if appropriately educated and conditioned to fit in with the majority, they could be absorbed into the fabric of life (assimilation); to a more recent inclusive understanding of community that recognises diversity as an essential aspect of human creativity and

International Conference on Computers in Education 2004

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supporte its expression (civil rights regimes, multiculturalism and civic pluralism). Each of these shifts coincided with particular views about culture the economy and education. And each was supported by ideologies of the good life and the technological capacities to realise it (Kalantzis, 2000).

More recently there has been another tug of war about the impact of diversity with strong debates emerging about the value of policies and practices of multiculturalism, affirmative action, equal opportunity, civil and human rights, and so on. These are now being regarded as antithetical to freedom and choice in a democracy. The assumption is that difference has been accommodated in first world countries and thus no longer requires special attention. In fact, for some, diversity is regarded as something that divides people and is used as a ploy to gain an unfair advantage. Moreover, they fear that the persistence of cultural and faith differences even challenges the gains of democracy and go so far as to predict that this could lead to a ‘clash of civilisations’. These new anxieties are emerging at a time of unparallel diversity, not only of peoples but goods, services and technologies for communication and information. This is a time when the global is becoming local and the local global, when communities are deliberately distinguishing themselves and affinity groups are forming around all sorts of characteristics. This is the paradoxical moment in which we are working.

These debates, of course, have been mirrored in education and influence both theory and practice. They impact on the way we understand each other as people and on the way we work and educate. All educators appreciate that diversity and learner differences are significant variables in sites of learning. There is no dispute about that. There is, however, a range of views about how much these differences matter and what needs to be done. Following then, is an approach to thinking about human diversity in learning contexts.

Humans, of course, are born with an innate capacity to learn, and over the span of a lifetime learning never stops. It is in our nature to learn, education or no education, curriculum or no curriculum, pedagogy or no pedagogy. Everyday learning happens in ways that are relatively unconscious, haphazard and tacit. Everyday learning is deeply embedded within the world. Education , on the other hand, is the conscious nurturing of learning in a community which has been designed primarily for that purpose. Education is different from everyday learning in several respects. It is deliberate—learning is addressed in a relatively conscious, systematic and explicit way. In each of these respects, everyday learning is different from education (Kalantzis and Cope, 2004a; Kalantzis and Cope, 2004b).

The key questions then is what makes for success and failure in learning, and how do we address the diversity that learners bring with them. Particularly given that inherent differences between our native capacities are hard to unscramble from cultural differences.

Everyday Learning Learning By Design

Amorphous: haphazard and tacit.

Unorganised: incidental, accidental, roundabout.

Endogenous: embedded everywhere in the world,

and so much so that it is often all-but invisible.

Deliberate: conscious, systematic and explicit.

Efficient: structured and goal oriented.

Exophoric: for and about the ‘outside world’.

In order to learn, the learner has to feel that the learning is for them. Learners have to be motivated by what they are learning. The learning has to include them. The more a learner ‘belongs’ in all these senses, the more they are likely to learn. Belonging to learning is founded on three things: the learning ways, the learning content and the learning community. Our natures may be taken as a departure point for understanding our differences. Sex, race and (dis)ability supply a biological or corporeal starting point for understanding the basis of our differences. But this is only the beginning. Difference is also self identified and socially ascribed. This is when the cultural accretions to our natures, and our social relations of difference, become so very manifest and critical. Dimensions of difference include: ethnicity/race (and indigenous, immigrant, minority and colonising positions), gender (and sexual orientation), socio-economic group, locale (global and regional) and (dis)ability. We will call these gross demographics ‘Difference 1’.


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Behind the gross demographics lie human attributes that are the underlying substance of these differences—experiences, interests, orientations to the world, values, dispositions, sensibilities, communication styles, interpersonal styles, thinking styles and the like. This is the raw material of identity, the stuff of the ‘lifeworld’ (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000; Husserl, 1970) This we will call these underlying attributes ‘Difference 2’.

The lifeworld of Difference 2 is the everyday lived experience that learners bring to a learning setting. The underlying attributes of lifeworld difference form the basis of identity and subjectivity. These attributes are the fundamental bases of a learner’s sense of belonging in an everyday or formal learning setting, and their levels of engagement. Measure any one underlying attribute of lifeworld difference and you will find greater internal difference within a demographically defined group than the average difference between groups. Difference 1 is a powerfully revealing ‘first take’ on learner differences. Difference 2, however, is where the realities of difference truly lie. And on the measure of Difference 2, the extent of internal difference within any group defined in terms of Difference 1 attributes, will be greater than the measure of average difference between Difference 1 groups.

Difference 1: Gross Demographics Difference 2: Underlying Lifeworld

Attributes

Gender

Age

Ethnicity/Race

Locale

Socio-economic group

(Dis)ability

... and the like.

Experience

Interests and orientations

Values

Dispositions and sensibilities

Communication and interpersonal styles

Thinking styles

... and the like.

Unless learning engages with the specifics of individual and group identities, it will not be productive. For behind the demographics are real people, who have always already learned and whose range of learning possibilities are both boundless and circumscribed by what they have learned already and what they have become through that learning. Learning succeeds or fails to the extent that it engages the varied subjectivities of learners.

Dynamics of Difference

We are creatures of subjectivity, identity and motivation—intuitive, instinctive and deeply felt.

The ‘lifeworld’ is the ground of our existence, the already-learned and continuously-being-learnt

experience of everyday life.

The lifeworld is deeply permeated by difference; in fact, there is a myriad of diverging and interacting

lifeworlds.

The individual is uniquely formed at the intersection of many group identities; they are a unique

concatenation of many group identities, and live in and through multiple or multilayered identities.

The lifeworld is the ground of all learning, including the secondary processes of learning by design. And as learning occurs through engagement, engagement must be with learners in their lifeworld reality, and that reality is marked by extraordinary difference. Learning however is not simply about recognising and affirming difference. Learning is a journey away from the learner’s comfort zone, away from the narrowness and limitations of the lifeworld.

The learning journey takes two paths, along two axes. Education will not result in learning if the landscape is unseeable, unthinkable, incomprehensible, unintelligible, unachievable. This brings us back to Learning Condition 1, the need to engage with identity. The key dilemma is how to make learning gel for all students. And why do we need to learn? What is the role of formal, institutionalised learning? Why do we bother with learning by design when the lifeworld is already so profoundly a site of learning? It is because learning can transport you into new lifeworlds. There is no equity in


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education unless the two learning conditions are met. Learning has to engage with students’ identities, and these identities must be recognised as different. The distance between the lifeworld and what is to be learnt must be productive.

Conditions of Learning

Condition 1: BELONGING—effective learning engages the learner’s identity. It builds on the

learner’s knowledge, experiences, interests and motivation. In any learning community, there is a

broad range of difference, and this is because the everyday lifeworlds from which students come are

always varied.

Condition 2: TRANSFORMATION—effective learning takes the learner on a journey into new and

unfamiliar terrains. However, for learning to occur, the journey into the unfamiliar needs to stay with a

zone of intelligibility and safety. At each step, it needs travel just the right distance from the learner’s

lifeworld starting point.

Belonging is a generalised condition of learning, whether learning is endogenous to the everyday lifeworld, or whether learning is by conscious design. Spaces of formal learning are strangely not of the world, and for some learners, they prove just too strange. Transformational learning in these cases is incidental to circumstantial change. Education, however, uniquely makes transformation a deliberate project. Transformation is one of the primary purposes of learning by design.

The case this paper makes is that the new technologies make it possible for us to address and engage with the human diversity referred to above in much more effective ways than were available to us hitherto. Moreover, it maintains that diversity is no longer an issue of rights or moral judgment but at the core of the new society that is emerging characterised both by globalisation and the new technologies. A world, in which recognising, harnessing and negotiating diversity, in all its manifestations, has become an essential component for effective workplaces, cohesive societies and competent individuals.

New Technologies

A revolution is certainly occurring in education. This revolution is being fuelled in part by new information and communication technologies. Fundamentally, however, the change is in the human relations of learning.

The traditional classroom is itself a communications technology, a room large enough for a teacher to talk to twenty, thirty, even forty learners at once. Its classical oral communications modes were the teacher exposition, question and answer involving one learner at a time and whole-class recitation in unison. For most of the time an individual learner had to sit in silence. The primary written communications form of this classroom was the textbook (closely following the state-directed syllabus) and the learner produced their work (a piece of writing, a test) for an audience of one—the assessing teacher. The main official trace of the student’s work was a recorded score. The teacher was pivotal in the predominant communication patterns of the traditional classroom. Lateral peer-to-peer communication was practically unmanageable and when it did occur, it was mostly ‘off task’.

Sometimes this classroom was the medium for the transmission of disciplinary knowledge, divided for convenience into ‘subjects’. Or it was a place which inculcated a rudimentary ‘basics’ of reading, writing, mathematics and civics. At other times it was a place of passivity, boredom and failure.

This kind of education worked perfectly well when the learners were destined to belong to traditional workplaces which required deference to authority and whose skills requirements were minimal,


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predictable and stable. It was well suited to the creation of homogeneous and submissive citizenries in the service of the old nation-state. It was appropriate to the development of compliant personalities. Even the long tail of failure made a certain kind of sense, as a way of rationalising lack of opportunity for a large part of the society.

But this kind of education is becoming less and less appropriate to the society and economy of the twenty-first century. A series of related social changes are occurring, encapsulated in part by the idea of an emerging ‘knowledge society’. In the economy, value is increasingly located in the intangibles of human capacity, organisational flexibility, business processes, customer relationships, brand identity, technological know-how, product aesthetics and service values. This represents a shift away from the in the old grounding of value primarily in fixed capital and basic skills. In the domain of citizenship, the dynamics of belonging and governance now occurs at multiple and overlapping levels—from community organisations and workplaces, to self-regulating professions, to communities of common knowledge and shared taste, to the increasingly federated layers of local, regional, national and supranational government. In the domain of personality, identity differences become ever-more accentuated, and the keys to stable personality are responsibility, resilience and tolerance.

Herein lies an enormous challenge, and an enormous opportunity for education. What education does—building the knowledge capital of a society as well as the sensibilities to navigate ambiguity and complexity—is now fundamental. If formal education is to continue to play a central role in shaping effective and satisfied citizens, workers and learners it needs to recognise and harness the new means of creating and distributing knowledge. Education is thus a more pivotal social investment than it ever was in the past. The level of creativity and innovation required will also alter the relationship between government and places of learning.

Educators will need to remake themselves and the designs of the environments in which they engage with learners. To do this they will require new tools which support new ways of working. We need to imagine and test innovative tools and learning environments in which the blackboard, textbook, exercise book and test are augmented and at times replaced by digital technologies. The critical point, however, is not the technologies. The technologies present a wide range of potentials. Indeed, the first phase of so-called ‘elearning’ environments replicate and often even accentuate all that was inadequate about the traditional classroom—transmission of received knowledge, individualised learner communication, question and answer routines, narrowly focussed tests and uneven access to learning resources. Some of the first phase elearning environments even represent a reduction in the quality of traditional classroom. Despite their aura of newness, they are just as irrelevant to the needs of the knowledge society as the traditional classroom.

The significance of the new technologies is that, as media, they allow for very different ways of engaging, relating and communicating. We need to the potentials of the digital technologies to transform learning environments. To invent the tools that enable educators and learners to realise the full potential of new learning environments.

Digital Means of Production and Reproduction of Meaning

The signature technologies of the ‘Knowledge Society’ are the products of the ‘digital revolution’. Much has been said about this revolution. Some of it is optimistic hyperbole—about, for instance, the liberating power of cheap and easy information access and instantaneous hyperlinks which break apart linear structures of meaning and transform the role of the reader. Some of it is bleakly denigratory—about the sterility of machine-mediated communication and the centralisation of ownership and control of intellectual property in the hands of a class of wealthy individuals and affluent countries and to the exclusion of the bulk of the world’s population from powerful domains of knowledge. At this moment, it is hard to say whether the optimists or the pessimists will be proved correct.


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A less noticed aspect of the digital revolution is the series of interconnected changes in the means of production of signs (Cope and Kalantzis, 2003). To summarise, the changes are threefold:

The Mechanics of Rendering: The immediate focus of the business of signing—more broadly conceived as the design of meaning—shifts from configuring meaning form (the specifics of the audible forms of speaking and the visual form of written text) to ‘marking up’ for meaning function in such a way that alternative meaning forms, such as audio or visual (written) forms of language, can be rendered by means of automated processes from a common digital source. This is the domain of various markup languages (such as hypertext markup language), the semantic web, and interoperable reading devices (such as computers, mobile telephones and voice synthesisers).

Modality: In the digital era, written, imaged and audio forms of meaning are manufactured of the same stuff (the zeros and ones of computing bits that can equally generate symbolic character representations as bytes, iconic representations as pixels and audio representations as ticks). This new means of production of signs puts the visual, the written-textual and the audio on the same plane; and the visual and the written-textual even more so, as bytes are rendered through the configuration of pixels that constitute a particular character. As these varied digital meaning forms are made of the same raw materials, it is simply more practical then ever before to realise meaning functions multimodally.

Language Specificity: Meanings are increasingly designed on the basis of underlying social languages, generated from non-language-specific structures of meaning (information architectures or activity sequences), with various techniques used to facilitate translatability into a variety of natural languages—such as the techniques of machine translation, holophrastic visual representation or the shift from symbolic (language delimited) to iconic (increasingly universal, internationalist) representation. On top of the abstract arbitrariness of language itself is added another layer of arbitrariness—the genuine and practical arbitrariness of a particular language to the realisation of a meaning function. And once again the shift in the mechanics of semiosis as away from the logistics of language-bound meaning form to an analysis, description and record of meaning function.

Technology in Learning: Digital Dilemmas

Despite all that has been said about the compelling nature and spread of the new technology, paradoxically, there is considerable evidence of a return to traditional curriculum in the area of elearning. This is counterintuitive, at first glance anyway. What could be more future-oriented than learning on a computer, or better still, a networked computer? In a pedagogical sense, however, there is nothing necessarily new about computer-assisted and online learning environments. In fact, they can be a place for the revival of the worst of old learning environments: didactic, lock-step and assessed by an impassive private audience, in this case the computer calculating the ‘results’ of learning and reporting these to the student and the teacher. Indeed, elearning may well be worse than the old environments—more dogmatically univocal, linear and arbitrarily judgmental than even the most rigid of traditional teachers.

There can be little doubt that computer mediated learning (‘elearning’) is destined to become a larger part of the educational experience of children in the years to come (Castells, 2001; Cuban, 2001; Kerawalla and Crook, 2002; Snyder, 2002). The rationale for its introduction range from the need to immerse children in the ubiquitous information and communications technologies of our times, to the purported inherent qualities of elearning environments (Beach, 2000; Gilster, 1997; McFarlane and Sakellariou, 2002).

The critical question is the pedagogical quality of elearning as directly compared with traditional classroom environments. What are the ‘pedagogical moves’ characteristic of each domain. The theoretical foundation of this question is the presupposition in activity theory that the nature of an activity is in part determined by the tools used in that activity (Engestrom et al., 1999; Wertsch, 1998). So, the question is: to what extent and in what ways does computer mediated learning influence


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pedagogy? A secondary question is: what impact does any identifiable shift in pedagogy influence learning outcomes? We do not assume that technologies per se can influence learning outcomes. However, shifts in pedagogy which may be the direct or indirect effect of technology use, can have such an influence (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar, 2003; Sefton-Green and Buckingham, 1998; Yelland, 1999).

The debate about the role of computers in education (Yelland, 1998; Yelland, 2002) has intensified with more widespread access and the rapid emergence of the Internet from the mid 1990s. Today, 4.4 million Australian households have an internet connection (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2003) and nearly 13 million people have Internet access (CyberAtlas, 2004). The Internet and networking technologies more generally, represent a significant development in the use of computers in education, adding communications tools that were not initially a feature of personal computers as well as the potential to access enormous amounts of information, much of which might once have been sourced from libraries. If the widespread adoption of personal computers from the mid 1980s and then the Internet from the mid 1990s were two initial stages in the history of computers-in-education, then we are now at the cusp what we would argue is a third important stage. In this stage, it seems that traditional learning content may increasingly and at least in part be displaced by elearning resources (such as the Australian Learning Federation’s emerging resource bank of ‘learning objects’). Moreover, the communications and file sharing potentials of networked computing will open new possibilities for content creation by teachers and collaborative work by learners. We need to urgently interrogate the emerging possibilities of this third stage in the history of computers in education.

Information and communications infrastructures are clearly a central part of the development of a ‘knowledge society’, not only from the point of view of preparing students for a world of work where networked computers are pervasive, but also from the point of view of community participation, citizenship and learning (Kalantzis and Cope, 2001). Learners who are excluded from the new information spaces, will clearly be socially and culturally as well as economically disadvantaged (Cope and Kalantzis, 1997; Cope and Kalantzis, 2001; Cope and Kalantzis, 2003b; Cope and Kalantzis, 2004; Kalantzis and Cope, 2000).

However, as always, monumental technological and social changes such as the digital revolution are deeply fraught. On the one hand, critics argue that they add yet another dimension to inequality in the form of the digital divide (Castells, 2000; Castells, 2001; Gilster, 1997; Light, 2001; Mitchell, 1995). They also analyse what they consider to be the anti-humane aspects of the new technologies, the ‘grey ecologies’ of ‘telepresence’ in which we are tethered to machines, addicted to their ‘electronic dazzlement’ and but separated from our fellow humans (Virilio, 1997). Translating this generalised critique into classrooms, already advantaged learners increase their privilege by their access to computers and the Internet, but maybe at the expense of the qualitative human interactions that characterise powerful learning in traditional non-elearning classrooms. The critics of elearning also rightly point to the fact that much of the dedicated educational material is lock step and highly individualised (one user/one screen), appearing to be innovative in the ‘dazzlement’ of the medium, whilst in fact representing pedagogies that are of dubious quality. Whilst filling the learning space, they do not represent effective or powerful learning. At best, elearning is as good as the pedagogies that teachers would have used anyway (Windschitl and Sahl, 2002; Yelland, 2001; Yelland, 2002).

Learning objects, for instance, appear to be one of the dazzling innovations of the new elearning world. They are built on the constructivist principles of learner engagement and demand high levels of learner interaction, or so we are told, and with such regularly that constructivism has nearly become an article of elearning faith. As often as they provide an exciting glimpse of the future, however, learning objects can also be depressing reminder of the past. This is when they represent a form of curriculum development akin to old-style generic and centrally produced textbook publishing. Their creation often requires huge upfront investment, and computer coders rather than teachers are required to do the work. Some learning objects cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour of learner interaction to develop. The result, from a curriculum point of view, is frequently less than satisfactory. Instead of teachers actively being engaged in instructional design, they once again become recipients of learning resources that have been instructionally designed for them, by somebody else who knows better. And to justify the investment, the objects have to be sufficiently generic to reach a mass audience. As a consequence learning resources are created that do not


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engage with the panoply of lifeworld differences—local learning settings, groups of students and individual learners.

Often, the dazzle of learning objects is not so much in the pedagogy as it is in the colour and movement. The old textbook had a page with a diagram and text showing the phases of the moon; now the students can see the earth and the moon turning, and they might even be able to use their mouse to turn the orrery depicted on the screen. The only difference is that a still object has become a moving object. Pedagogically, this is a small and insignificant step. The dazzle is particularly deceptive when, behind the colour and movement, there is a traditional pedagogy.

This is not to dismiss learning objects. Some things they do well: drills, simulations and the presentation of vivid moving images. And when learning objects are structured like computer games, they also have the virtue of requiring the learner to be ‘in’ the narrative, not unlike the first person shooter games whose allure is to place the player at the centre of the story. There is much in elearning that is ingenious and inherently attractive.

Still, difficulties remain. Learning objects are dependent on computer access which all-too neatly sorts students onto one side or other of the digital divide, not just between one school and another but also between learners who have computers at home and those who don’t. This kind of learning is also machine dependent—if you’re not tethered to the machine, you’re not going to benefit from the learning object.

A more optimistic literature points to the social and educational possibilities of the new information and communications technologies. This literature points to the capacity of these technologies to galvanise communities of practice, handing over some of the means of cultural expression and communication from the expensive and highly centralised broadcast media of twentieth century modernity to smaller communities (websites, digital printing, mp3 music, digital video (Cope and Kalantzis, 2003a). The digital media are relatively easy to access and relatively cheap. The potential is to transform schools into ‘knowledge-producing communities’. Instead of being the recipients of transmitted knowledge (syllabuses, textbooks, ‘information’ resources), schools might become places where teachers and learners develop school-based knowledge banks, and where traditional classrooms, dominated as they are much of the time by teacher talk, are replaced by open schools in which groups of students work autonomously and collaboratively on knowledge projects within a structured ‘content management’ environment (Windschitl and Sahl, 2002; Yelland, 1998; Yelland, 1999).

Celebrated US educationalist, Larry Cuban, published a book in 2001 with the provocative title Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom (Cuban, 2001). His conclusion was that computers were just another fad, rather like school milk or school meals of the past, a seeming cure-all for a range of educational ills, but a in reality a fraudulent smokescreen which had achieved little or nothing of educational value. However, in the concluding pages of the book, he makes a remarkable prediction. It is one with which, as improbable as it may seem today, it is hard to disagree. ‘I predict that the slow revolution in technology access, fuelled by popular support and continuing as long as there is economic prosperity, will eventually yield exactly what the promoters have sought: every student, like every worker, will eventually have a personal computer. But no fundamental change in teaching practices will occur’ (pp.195-196).

When this eventuality does arrive, there may indeed be no fundamental change in teaching practices, but perhaps there could be, and perhaps there should be. It is this ‘could’ and ‘should’ which is our focal point. We want to examine what is different or new in elearning environments, and particularly the ‘third stage’ digital environments to which we alluded above, and what if any difference this makes to learner outcomes.

As for this latter question, we want to leave open the possibility that, at least in some respects, they may be better than traditional classrooms. Traditional ‘classroom discourse’ was built around a peculiar discursive play between one teacher and thirty-odd learners, bounded by four walls. It was, for simple logistical reasons, limited much of the time to teacher-centred didactic talk, and the teacher


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posing leading questions to one learner at a time. The result was a lot of silence for a most of the learners for most of the time. Here we draw on the analytical frame of reference developed by Courtney Cazden, in her pathbreaking book, recently reissued in a new edition, Classroom Discourse (Cazden, 2001).

The counterpoint to this reading of the traditional classroom has been a growing research literature which has attempted to demonstrate that computers can assist student learning in powerful ways in the level of personal interaction they require, the customisation of learning experiences or simply by exposing students to one of the foundational technologies and communications media of our times. This case is mainly centred around the theory of constructivism (Bereiter, 1994; Ferguson, 2001). Comparing these computer-mediated environments with traditional classrooms, one might even go so far as to claim that the classroom is an outmoded human and learning architecture, problematic from the start, and one which much of the time has not lived up to the promise of education.

Transformative learning environments can certainly be created without fancy technologies—with good curriculum design, on paper and with intensive oral interaction. Ideal uses of technology use mixed media, employing the Internet and computers as but one element in a learning environment whilst also providing channel alternatives—print, oral communication, and task-focused group interaction.

What matters most is the design of learning, and the curriculum architecture in which learning sits. What is the source of curriculum? How is it designed to mesh with the differences amongst learner lifeworld experiences and subjectivities? What is the nature of teacher-teacher, teacher-learner and learner-learner interaction in the fabrication and realisation of curriculum?

Digital learning objects are just another ‘input’, in much the same way that the chapter of a textbook might be used as an input. Learning design is much more than the construction of inputs. It connects a knowing expert—the teacher as knowledge worker—and learners brimming with all manner of interests and purposes. The inputs are incidental to this process. The real issue is one of engagement, and this will only occur in conditions of belonging and transformation, where the engagement carries the learner, one step at a time, distances that are appropriate to their starting point. None of this is inherent in the inputs, and that applies to a learning object as much as it does to a textbook chapter. The keys are the level of engagement, the datum point of the learner’s lifeworld, the dynamics of motivation, the time spent on task (sustained engagement), the success in expanding horizons and the effects of personal transformation.

The principal practical questions for curriculum are how to develop and share a broad range of curriculum units capable of engaging with widely different student interests and needs (rather than generic ‘activities’), how to track ‘performance’ measured as distance travelled (relative to the learner rather than the input), and how to account for the learner’s learning to the learners themselves, to parents, to the school, to the education system and to the broader community. Notwithstanding the limitations of learning objects, the digital technologies in their most recent phase of development do afford some exciting opportunities in developing transformative curriculum. It could be the beginnings of a curriculum the genuinely catered to difference.

New Learning

Needless to say, the debate about the digital future swings between the breathless optimism of the technologists to bleak views of the baleful consequences of the ‘grey ecologies’ of machine-mediated telepresence and the digital divide (Virilio, 1997). We would argue that much which is regarded as new, such as the ‘virtual’, hypertextuality and non-linear reading (Chartier, 1998; Chartier, 2001; Gilster, 1997; Mitchell, 1995), does little more than make more efficient the epistemological modes of text that developed in the centuries immediately following the invention of print in 1450.


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However, genuinely new potentials emerge with the multimodality (text, still and moving image, sound) intrinsic to digital convergence, its economies of scale and its highly distributed character. Older centralised, ‘transmission’ models of knowledge and learning are being be replaced in part by the collaborative work in knowledge producing communities—be this in organisations, professions or institutions of learning.

There is nothing anything in e-learning, however, which is meaningfully different to learning without the ‘e’. It’s just that a distributed digital information and communications infrastructure will facilitate the blurring of the boundaries between the formal and the informal domains, and between tacit knowledge designs and actively designed knowledge management systems. The new technologies just make it easier to do what we would have wanted to do anyway, but there is no inherent message in their medium.

The first phase of ‘elearning’ was concerned to use the digital medium as a new way of delivering content to learners in the form, for instance, of digital ‘learning objects’—effectively textbooks that move. The second phase attempts a more fundamental shift in the human relationships of learning and the directions of the knowledge flows. It can work with minimal computer access, but foreshadows a time, perhaps five or ten years hence, when every learner will have a laptop computer and possibly a range of other digital content creation and communications devices. Working in the digital medium will likely become as ubiquitous as the pen and paper of the traditional classroom. This is already the case in a few schools, but the full educational potentials of the digital technologies have as yet nowhere been realised.

Here is a scenario for the near future, closer to the vision of ‘knowledge management’:

• Students will use continuously networked computers to source a wide range of educational and general resources.

• Teachers will create and publish modular Learning Elements which students can access and work through at their own pace, individually or in groups, and negotiate alternative learning pathways with their teachers.

• Students will do their work in private collaboration spaces, invite in other creators to access the same files the case of (increasingly important) collaborative work; the teacher will act as a ‘publisher’ of this work, reviewing and commenting on drafts until a final work is ready to be published simultaneously to the class website as well as the student’s personal website.

• Every student will have their own website, which serves both as a digital portfolio of published works, and a ‘weblog’ which performs an identity-defining function (images, diary, personal biography etc.).

This will fundamentally change the human and knowledge relations of learning:

• Learners will be autonomous and responsible, working at their own pace and following learning pathways determined by their own prior knowledge and lines of interest.

• Collaborations and joint work will be easily managed and using devices such as emails mirrored in a message spool each time a collaborator makes a change to a work, and capturing the conversations and negotiations around the evolution of a work.

• The audience for a student work will be increasingly lateral, communicated not just to the teacher but also to fellow students, the wider learning community and parents.

• The direction of knowledge flows will be bottom-up less than top-down: learners will use a variety of sources to build their own knowledge and teachers will translate broad curriculum goals into locally engaged curriculum.

• Learning will be localised, relevant and engaged, connecting with the learner’s social environment, personal interests and experience, whilst making powerful links between local or specific knowledge and global or general knowledge.

• From being the objects of broadcast knowledge (textbooks to learning objects) schools will become knowledge creating communities.


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How, then, can schools become knowledge producing communities and not just receivers and transmitters of knowledge? What tools do they need to produce:

• Authentic, relevant, local, community-linked, engaged learning?

• Rigorous management of school, teacher and learner intellectual property?

• Peer-to-peer classroom interactions: from teacher talk to learner collaborations?

• From knowledge purchasers and receivers to knowledge producing communities?

• Private and public work spaces?

• Open-ness and transparency in learning communities?

• Rich assessment: digital portfolios as a record of learning?

These changes—social (the ‘Knowledge Society’) as well as technological (the Digital Revolution)—have thrown down an enormous challenge to education. One response is to try to do everything but to succeed at nothing—the crowded curriculum or the shopping mall curriculum. Another is the ‘anything goes’ approach, in which inequality ends up being rationalised as diversity. And still another response is to butt out—education can’t deal with issues of identity and personality because they’ve simply become too big and too hard; it should just stick to its core business. None of these responses is adequate.

Education today has a much larger role to play in creating socially productive persons. This contention anticipates trends and demands of the new knowledge economy, many of them already visible. A sharp increase in knowledge-intensive industries is occurring, but new learning recognises that traditional areas such as manufacturing will also be transformed by the rise of Information and Communication Technologies, greater collaboration, and the need for interpersonal and problem-solving skills. Put simply, nations in the new economy are judged not by the value of their fixed capital, but by the skills and knowledge of their workforce.

The conditions of work, citizenship and personal identity are markedly changing. These changes have thrown down an enormous challenge to education. Political rhetoric on the growing importance of education is evident on a global scale. Research also indicates that the education sector is growing in most nations; that the expansion of higher education, in particular, has become a key global issue; and that even traditional industries such as manufacturing and agriculture are becoming more knowledge-intensive. These are global trends, despite their greater visibility in advanced industrialised nations.

Education is also one of the main ways to deliver on the promise of democracy. Learning promises individuals greater social mobility: more access to material resources through better paid employment; a greater capacity to participate actively in the processes of government; and the personal dexterity that comes with knowing the world. It promises communities improved employment prospects, increased self-determination and extended access to the wider world. The key challenge, however, is to ensure that education fulfils its democratic mission, through quality teaching, a transformative curriculum, and dedicated programs which address inequality. Targeting groups disadvantaged and ‘at risk’ must be done, not on the basis of moral arguments alone, but also on the basis of the economic and social dangers of allowing individuals and groups to be excluded.

A radical restructuring of learning is required to prepare students, workers, and citizens of the twenty first century. New learning is not a fad. Indeed, nations which resist educational change are arguably imperilling the success and prosperity of their citizens in the long term. Whatever the merits of globalisation, its influence is inexorable and undeniable. Already, globalisation has substantially altered the dominant conditions of work, citizenship and identity. Learning must adapt accordingly. Successful education in the twenty first century will promote active citizens—secure in their identities, and with a broad range of skills and sensibilities. Above all, successful education will mean embracing diversity and the principles of new learning (Kalantzis and Cope, 2001).


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Reference List

Chartier, R. 1998. The Transformation of Written Culture. vol. 2002: The Book & The Computer

2001. Readers and Readings in the Electronic Age. vol. 2001: text-e.org

Cope, B and Kalantzis, M. 2000. Designs for Social Futures. Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, ed. by Bill Cope and Kalantzis Mary, 203-34. London: Routledge.

2003. Text-Made Text. Melbourne: Common Ground

Gilster, P. 1997. Digital Literacy. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Husserl, E. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Kalantzis, M. 2000. Multicultural Citizenship. Rethinking Australian Citizenship, ed. by Wayne Hudson and John Kane, 99-110. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Kalantzis, M. and Cope, B. 2001. New Learning: A Charter for Australian Education. 160pp. Canberra: Australian Council of Deans of Education

2004a. Designs For Learning. E-Learning, 1.38-92.

2004b. Learning by Design. Melbourne: RMIT University

Mitchell, W. J. 1995. City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Virilio, P. 1997. Open Sky. London: Verso.

Diversity, new technologies and new learning

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