Building Diaspora: Some Questions of Virtual Geography?

Mark Laidler   RMIT University In order to listen to this presentation, you need a sound card and a RealPlayer.

This is the title of a paper I was intending to deliver at the "Learning On Line '98: Building the Virtual University" conference hosted by Virginia Tech. Its aim was to explore the possibilities afforded to us by the rapid developments of distributed learning technology. My key question being; 'What can we do now that we couldn't do before?'

I was interested in exploring the notion of learning communities and the concept of diaspora as borderless learners who gathered in virtual spaces to share knowledges and learning in direct challenge to the authorised and disciplined enlightenment of the university.

Prior to the Virginia conference, I attended a conference in London which was addressing similar issues to those at Virginia. As explained in the RealAudio, I was confronted with questions and issues which were obviously troubling many of the conference delegates on both sides of the Atlantic. By the time I was to present my paper it became apparent that these issues needed to be addressed first.

What follows in this presentation is my response to these issues and the collected thoughts of those in the audience.

This presentation is about 50 minutes. There is some distortion at the 42 minute mark which only lasts a few minutes. It wasn't possible to edit this without damaging the flow of the discussion.

This presentation is reproduced with the permission of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, VA and was originally presented on June 20, 1998.