This is a hybrid document and its form and history need some explanation! The slides were produced for a presentation to the Faculty of Arts at Deakin University. I was asked to respond to a 'showcase' of on-line projects, most of which involved experiments in web-based 'flexible learning'. In the event I decided, a few minutes before the presentation, not to use these slides (a decision I will explain in a moment) but to talk directly to the audience. Afterwards several people asked me if I could make my notes available.

What I have done is to take the slides (that I did not use!) and add notes which provide a commentary on the slides. This is in an attempt to reconstruct part of what I said and an extension and elaboration of some points to take account of conversations with various people since and to make the presentation accessible to a wider audience. Do not be surprised if you find slippage and discrepancies between the slides and the text! Or if things I said have disappeared from the text or been replaced. Even in print I am still thinking out loud and on my feet!

What did I say? After making a disclaimer to the effect that I saw my role to be to provoke a critical response to the move to on-line teaching but that I did not intend this as a direct criticism of the work of any of the admirable projects which we had just seen demonstrated, this is (more or less) how I began:

David F. Noble 'Digitial Diploma Mills: The automation of Higher Education'

I intended to use a Powerpoint presentation but I have just this moment decided not to do so. I want to explain this decision. I have unplugged the computer because I want to talk to you, not at you. While I find Powerpoint useful as a way of organising ideas I also find that it has the effect on me of making me feel diminished as a teacher. In a situation of this kind, I feel it comes between us. For you and I both to look at a screen which (like an autocue) prompts me to speak, offers me a sense of security but it feels disingenuous, false, at best disconcerting. So, I decided to take the risk and switch it off as a first step in trying to talk to you about what I think are some important issues of teaching and learning as we move into the on-line world.

Some of you may feel that this introduction is not trvial since in itself exemplifies the problem and, like me, you may feel that the purpose of teaching should be to reduce the dependence of the student on the teacher and to focus the gaze of the student on the text.. I agree that our aim should be to foster intellectual autonomy but I have come to believe that this can only be achieved through a developing relationship between teacher and student. The apparent objectification that takes place when we move what we want to say to a set of slides, a web page or a CDROM (or a book) is often in fact a diversion from our need to attend to a relationship within which our purpose is the intellectual development of the student. Whether or not I cando this successfully remains to be seen but in switching off the computer and stepping in front of the lectern I feel I have at least (if only symbolically) made a gesture, and perhaps a start.

Central to the discourse of on-line teaching is the notion of 'interaction'. But, despite some honorable attempts to foster real discussion, I believe that the word 'interaction' has generally been devalued. Interestingly both multimedia developers and teachers talk often of 'interaction' as a virtue to which they aspire, yet in most MM games, and in classrooms, what counts as interaction seems most often trivial in the extreme. In effect what we get is not real discussion but the persistence of recitation of the most trivial kind.

In distance education we often make the mistake of thinking that what we teach is contained by the materials. We assume that the Study Guide, Reader and other unit materials (now including web pages, and other digital resources) encapsulate what students learn, or perhaps more cynically, that they provide the resources that make it possible for students to complete the assignments.

So it is often puzzling when we get messages on the voice mail, or via email or on the e-conference which ask 'ls anybody there?'

I take this voice to be (more often than not) a plea for the embodiment of the curriculum, a need on the part of the student to feel that they have some point of contact with their teacher. That they are somebody and so are we. They desire, I believe, an expression of their identity as a student that can only realised through some form of relationship with us as teachers. They can only learn if they know somebody is there.

If you accept this then I think that the challenge of on-line teaching is less a curriculum challenge than a need to reconstruct ourselves as teachers. The questions are not technological so much as questions about the mediation of human interaction. What does it mean to be an on-line teacher (or student)? How should we speak and how should we listen? How can we support students in their pursuit of intellectual autonomy? How can we create a critical academic community among people who never meet?

We learn, I believe, not from texts or other resources, but from someone. The best on-line resources take account of this: you have the feeling that there is somebody there, that the writers have taken care to put themselves into the production process at a level of some detail. You only have to look at Stephen DeLong's 'The shroud of lecturing', the Life of Edward Confessor and the pages that the Deakin Arts faculty has produced for its MA in Science and Technology Studies (http://arts .deakin.edu.au/ssi/higher_degree/masts/default.htm), to know that this is educational material that has been produced by people who have a deep love for knowledge which is expressed not just intellectually but aesthetically. The choice of font, the layout of the pages, the use of graphics are all the consequence of a deep sense of purpose. This is rare. Many web pages I see are superficial, cluttered, gimmicky and not produced at all with the user in mind. The difference is that quality is marked by the fact that somebody is there, that they care about what they are doing and that they are doing it withdeep sense of educational purpose and commitment. Currently Deakin's policy in this area is the the pursuit of 'low cost, low end' quality on-line teaching, but I believe this is a a myth. Quality demands high levels of commitment and risk and so always comes at a cost, not least the costs of time, commitment, imagination and research.

For those of you who are not familiar with education-speak I should explain that I am using the word 'curriculum' to mean something more than 'content'. Let Lawrence Stenhouse explain:

What is a curriculum as we now understand the word? ... it is not a syllabus - a mere list of content to be covered - nor even is it what German speakers would call a Lehrerplan - a prescription of aims and methods and content. Nor is it in our understanding a list of objectives.

Let me claim that it is a symbolic or meaningful object, like Shakespeare's first folio, not like a lawnmower; like the pieces and board of chess, not like an apple tree. It has a physical existence but also a meaning incarnate in words or pictures or sound or games or whatever.

... But what use is it to a student or a teacher? Often apparently, not much. Like some wedding presents it is in a month or two more likely to be found in the attic than in the living room. But that analogy is not quite right. A better one is the affluent outhouse containing the unused golf clubs, canoe, sailing dingy, skis, ice skates and glider. All the possessions which implied not simply ownership but learning, the development of new skills on the part of the owner - Mr Toad's curriculum of derelict skiffs and canary-coloured caravans. Material objects cast aside because the teacher was not prepared to face the role of learner they forced upon him.

... by virtue of their meaningfulness curricula are not simply means to improve teaching but are expressions of ideas to improve teachers. Of course, they have a day-to-day instructional utility: cathedrals must keep the rain out…’

J Rudduck & D Hopkins eds Research as a Basis for Teaching: Readings from the work of Lawrence Stenhouse Heinemann Educational Books London 1995 pp. 67-69

I don't want you to think that I am arguing for a return to all the values of elitist tertiary teaching, far from it. But I think we need to think hard about which values and practices we are prepared to give up and which we want to fight for. Changes in the role of the university demand that we all rethink what we do when we teach.

One of the important things that have changed is that it is clear that using the new media calls for teamwork. In most cases it is not the lone lecturer who creates the material, it is groups of people; groups that include designers, editors, multimedia script writers and a wide range of people we have always tended to see as 'support' staff.

In asking the question , Where is the teacher? I know that the answer will raise a lot of questions about the nature of academic work and how it is changing. One crucial change lies in the increasing need we have for dependence on others.

So we face a paradox. Our concern is with the pursuit of intellectual autonomy in the face of a need for greater co-operation, teamwork and respect for the specialist skills of others. And in this lies what I see as a crucial tension between academic values and the rapid emergence of the university as a corporate organisation embedded in a mercantile culture. I have borrowed the phrase 'mercantile culture' from Susan Saltrick, from a lecture she titled 'Through a Wood Darkly', which she gave to a conference last year, (the paper was made available in a list serv run by the American Association for Higher Education <aahesgit@list.cren.net> AAHESGIT 219/1 and 221/2

We see this in small things. For instance, in the increasing tendency to put the Deakin logo on web pages which contain academic knowledge (are you as affronted by this as much as I am?), in a tremor of organisational concern about the risks of losing intellectual property rights as we move courses on line (what of the rights and responsibilities we owe the invisible college?), in the shifts of language around the discourse of teaching (look at what has happened to words like 'interaction' and 'student centred learning').

I am aware that I am sounding more cynical than I feel. It is important that I tell you that I am an advocate for the use of the new media in teaching. I am an avid user. I spend at least six hours every day sitting face-to-face with a screen. I talk with my students on email and on First Class, I am in and out of web pages several times every hour. The colleague with whom I work most closely works in another language in another country yet we talk to one another far more often, and more intimately, than I do with the people who work in adjacent offices, let alone on other campuses. But I have some misgivings. There are some things that disturb me in this and I think the way forward is not to gloss these concerns but to expose them to the glare of intellectual criticism.

I am not being critical in order to promote a negative response, I am being critical in an attempt to find a way forward. Isn't this what we all believe is central to academic values? That the creative and the critical are interdependent? That critical reflection on practice is the only way to improve practice?

But in a more directly practical way, what can we do? My suggestion is that we shift the level of our thinking. I see dangers in being trapped in a limited conception of on-line teaching as a new set of techniques to be learnt, tempting as it is to take this view, since to do so is (mistakenly) to seem to leave academic culture intact.

I think we should resist the temptation to see 'on line teaching' in terms of technology and instead look at it as constituting a new medium. For then we are forced to see the challenge, not as a challenge to teaching methods but as a challenge to educational strategies.

In practice this means thinking in an integrated way about the decisions we make about what and how to teach, with what and how students actually learn (not how we think they should) and with what and how we assess the process (our part in it and theirs).

Stenhouse quote can be found in Rudduck & Hopkins op cit p 124

It is one of the catchphrases of the digital world that the shift from literate to electronic cultures is primarily a shift from 'few writers; many readers' to a world of 'many writers/readers'. Clearly this shift demands a strategic response. We don't just have to do the same things differently. If we are educating people to participate in this emerging culture then we must do different things (and expect very different forms of work and levels of engagement from our students).

My own belief is that this will mean a rethinking of much that we currently take-for-granted, especially our allegiances to academic disciplines and the organisational infrastructures that we have built around them, I think we need to abandon 'units' and think in terms of 'courses', break up schools and faculties and find better structures, rethink the relative roles of academic and support staff. But what is important is not that we trade in one (albeit inadequate) vision for a new one but that we rethink, perhaps in quite fundamental ways what we are doing, for whom and why. Yet at the very time we need to do this, the organisations within which we work (or as they tend to say, 'employ' us) have acted to reduce our capacity to make such decisions; even to think such things. More and more decisions that should be strategic are made in terms of immediate financial crises, student numbers and staff costs. The scope of the academic dimension has shrunk and academic leadership has been displaced by efficient management.

It seems to me that our critical impulses have, for the moment, led us into a cul-de-sac. We find it hard to see ahead and so get easily led by the policies (even the fantasies) of those with power. The important thing, I believe, is not to follow policy created by others but to use the move to on-line teaching to break out of the trap that the technology has set for us. This is what we know and if we are unable to think our way through the current crisis to new ways of teaching and new ways of using what we know, then perhaps the idea of the university is in more serious trouble than I imagine.

About the Author:

Rob Walker
Deakin Centre for Education and Change
Deakin University
phone: +61-2-5227 1460
fax: +61-2-5227 2014