Many of our institutions are being transformed, often on the basis of minimal research into the potential impact on students and faculty. I would like to examine the way this context of change has influenced our views on learning and on the disciplines and institutions that support these activities. For example, if we approach the classroom as a communications environment (an inevitable outcome of the shift to computerization) sharing characteristics with other forms of communication what does this suggest for the orientation we can take towards the disciplines we are teaching? If the classroom is so to speak more of a palette for the construction of meaning through a plethora of activities, does this recreate the institutions we are attached to? 

Research practices have also changed with consulting groups now providing the general background material requested by educational policymakers in nearly all areas. These groups are developing not only new ways of arriving at research projects and research results but are heavily involved in the advocacy needed to influence government and industry. Books such as Paradigm Shift and The Digital Economy by Don Tapscott have sold in excess of 200,000 copies. His new book, The Net Generation can be found in bookstores worldwide and companies like Hewlett Packard bought five thousand copies for free distribution to their employees. Many of the reports written for the development of virtual universities in the US and Canada have been produced by consulting firms. Most of the templates currently on offer for distance education have been created and are sustained by the research projects of consulting companies.

The importance of rigor and depth as well as breadth are deemed to be less significant than providing answers to the many questions now on the table. The research is governed by an urgency that precludes lengthy investigations. Interestingly, much of the work makes no bones about the ways in which ideas are borrowed from many different disciplines. The Net Generation, for example, borrows from ethnography, sociology, cultural studies and communications with a wild abandon that dissolves the boundaries between them. This could well be a positive side to the activity, but instead, it is based on a lack of knowledge of disciplinary history and rigour.

Education and learning have become integral to assumptions about the direction communities are choosing to head in and about the possible social formations that could be created by a more educated and better trained citizenry. Education is being linked to the economies of the future and is the foundation for a yet to be realized effort at convergence between learning, entertainment and technology. All of this activity is being linked to industry in so many different ways that distinctions between learning, capital and profit are proving to be of little value in explaining the shifts. 

In fact, agendas for change are now being designed by people who are not necessarily linked to education at all. The example most pertinent to this discussion was the recent decision to put computers in all K-12 classrooms in Ontario. The research for this was done with little input from teachers and was based instead on a series of consultant’s reports about educational technology and its future role in learning. 

There is I believe a strong need for research into this new arena of knowledge creation, marketing and consulting. This research will have to come from areas like cultural studies and communications which need to become more focused on the socioeconomic context within which new forms of knowledge and new paradigms of understanding are being created. In other words, as members of the academy we no longer control the circulation of ideas in the same way as in the past and if this is so, it means that our students will be approaching their education with a very different attitude than in the past. They will have had access to ideas via many distinct venues produced by disparate modes of circulation and production through informal and formal means. 

I would like to draw out the elements of this new landscape with the intention of asking some questions and perhaps making some claims about the pedagogical and research direction that can be taken in the face of these transformative activities. My concerns are as much with classroom practice as they are with the structuring of learning communities. I am interested in linking different activities here, learning, education, technology, the process of change and the role of academic disciplines in shaping perceptions of culture, theoretical inquiry and practical activity. 

At the same time, I am concerned with the vocabulary that we can use to describe and analyze the unstable cultural activities of late 20th century society. I am fascinated with how imaging technologies have come to play such a central role in our understanding of change. Images, be they on a screen or a computer monitor have become more than just a medium for the transmission of ideas, thoughts, and emotions. Images have become the portals that we all use to explore a whole host of experiences and they have become the foundation for how we approach learning. Ironically, as more research has appeared on visual culture less is being said about the ubiquity of learning experiences that are dependent upon screen-based environments.

The arrival of the Internet has heightened the role of image-based learning and experience. How can we frame the interaction here among technology, modes of representation, education, information and knowledge? Metaphorically, the Internet comes to stand for those points of connection which bring a variety of different media and people together. But what does that mean? Do we fully understand the implications of the displacement from one historical moment to the next as it is represented through a diversity of media forms? And crucially, how can learning communities respond to the challenges of change here if we do not fully understand our use of technology in the learning process? From my vantage point as the head of an institution, these questions are extremely urgent. Many people in my role are being encouraged to pursue an agenda not dissimilar to the one that was initiated in the 1950s around distance education. (Essentially, educational leaders were asked to convert their textbooks into modules for off-campus use. Television was also a component of this.) Government policy, nurtured by a variety of assumptions most of which have their origin in reports that were put together by consultants, (It is not an accident that companies like KMPG and Coopers Lybrand are among the most profitable in the world of consulting. They have made a point of concentrating on the education market and new technologies of instruction and learning.) is moving in the direction of virtual campuses and flexible learning. Some of this activity is very positive. I am a supporter of life-long learning and alternatives methods of instruction. I am not a supporter of simply introducing change because it feels ‘right’. 

The temporal divisions between different stages of learning are no longer applicable in the same way as they were in the past. Progression, movement through school from one level to the next cannot be thought about as a movement from the simple to the complex or from one carefully delineated level of learning to the next. The phrase life-long learning is best understood if we examine the students who are coming to our institutions. We no longer have students just out of high school, but a mixed and quite complex group of different ages with different needs and expectations. Among those universities and colleges that have been the most active in responding to the needs of the community, you find that the distinctions between part-time and full-time students are far less relevant than they were even five years ago. Students who have extensive professional experience are returning to the post-secondary system in large numbers. 

This mixture of needs and expectations may mean that our modes of address have to change. It may also change the direction of research. For example, a student with extensive experience in using a computer to produce animation needs to find a way into the history of animation. He/she should have some understanding of the relationship of that history to the artistic practice of creating animation films. But what if the history of animation itself needs to be rethought in light of new practices that have come about in the last ten years? What if we need to think differently about the role of technology in the development of animation as a creative tool and activity of representation? What kinds of histories are possible given the extraordinary acceptance of animation within popular culture? We are now positioned differently with respect to animation and may be able to write a number of histories that examine the intersections of painting, drawing, modeling, performance, visual literacy and so on in creating the operative field for experimentation with the medium. The experimentation itself can be viewed from many different angles that may explain why digital animation is so attractive as a storytelling vehicle. I could go on. This is as much a work on history as it is an attempt to deal with historical events and their location in space and time. It is ultimately an argument about specificity and also about methodology. How can all of this be translated into courses structured to reflect complexity and historical discourse? Can these issues simply be moved over to an Internet-based teaching and learning environment? I ask these questions because I am not sure of the answers. Does the availability of information over the Internet mean that it is understood? How do we find out? Well, one way might be to have courses that examine the information in a particular area and critically reflect upon its depth or relevance. Is this just the same as opening a bunch of texts and reading them? To what degree does the medium play a role here?

The technological context of education has a transformative effect on research, learning and teaching. We need to understand the intersection of all these activities as a form of historical production and apply the lessons learned to our retrospective work on the history of education.

The dissolution of the conventional divisions between ‘school’ and other types of experiences is an integral part of the life-long learning process. It means that the Prior Learning Assessment Movement, for example, will take on more and more importance as students try to get credit for activities which may have led to learning through more informal means or through work-related experiences. It is also a legitimization of auto-didacticism and a way of confirming and broadening the role of learning as a cultural experience and culture as a learning experience. It offers tremendous opportunities and many dangers. 

The notion of learning as a cultural experience means that the self-directed learner becomes a legitimate category used by policy makers to explain and act upon the heterogeneity of the social and cultural experience of education. It also relocates the learning experience within the social and cultural frameworks of everyday life. It is both an affirmation of the everyday and sets precedents about the location of learning. It is no longer possible to make the claim that education takes place solely in the classroom, but whereas cultural theorists may have acceded to that point a number of years ago, it is now moving to the level of policy. Questions nevertheless remain about the methodologies that can be used to explain these many new ‘sites’ of learning. This does suggest that cultural historians and theorists can now make some serious contributions to public debate around this issue if they are ready to deal with the new forms of cultural expression and display that may be produced.

Learning as a cultural experience also means that we may be able to talk about culture through the lenses of criticism and theory, materials and production in a linked and mapped fashion or maybe the better term might be hyper-linked. It means that cultural theory may have to be more aggressive in claiming some territory here, otherwise it will be taken over by policy-makers with very different expectations about the cultural experience of learning.

Now some of this may not be that new. There has always been a struggle around prior learning assessment and it was a big issue in education in the early 20th century. But what is new is the degree of access that individuals in developed countries can get to learning materials and the number of people and institutions that are making a claim on their ability to teach and to reach potential students. (In Vancouver 1300 new private educational institutions have appeared on the scene over the last five years.) 

I will take three components of the educational experience from the point of view of teachers and students; diversity, community and change and quickly explore their relationship to new technologies. The goal here is to begin to describe the space we now occupy for the teaching of images and cultural studies. Diversity here refers not only to cultural difference and national origin but to the multi-dimensional presence of diversity within a virtual context. Connectivity is not just about connections but about reconceptualization. Connections are not just about information and transmission, but about diverse cultures finding new venues to speak to each other, new environments to explore similarities, differences and conflicts. It becomes possible to connect cultures from the North and South and in so doing to recreate the terrain for criticism and analysis. If people in cultural studies do not actively engage with this multiple set of spaces others will. This is the difference from previous shifts in education. We will need to develop new and innovative pedagogical methods for dealing not only with the many levels of learning which will be possible through digital means, but also the potential interfaces between knowledge, communication and information within virtual environments. 

This suggests that new communities of interest, activity and action will be formed. We have ready evidence of this through the Web, but also within the history of desktop publishing and zines. These new communities have already had a profound influence on education because of the Internet. What happens when these communities form themselves into learning communities? I will not explore what others have described as a seismic shift, suffice to say that a good example of this new community structure at work are on-line newspapers created by students from many different constituencies and countries in which their work is both published and commented upon. Another example is virtual galleries that become local, national and international forums for the exchange and sharing of ideas, information and creative work. These are but a few of the many possible examples one could refer to. They presume a certain level of knowledge and ability by the participants and a desire to develop a relationship with virtual environments, as well as a desire to critically distinguish between the different layers of meaning that are generated and produced. 

The third area worthy of discussion is what we mean by change in the late 20th century in the context of education. Technology may be front and center but it is not the driver. Careful distinctions need to be drawn between information, communication and knowledge. These distinctions need to be drawn out in relation to the learning experience and one has to avoid overly linear interpretations of how students approach the diversity of choices now available to them.

But, we are in the midst of some historic shifts in direction. For example, the claim that students have a broader set of information available to them for learning needs to be qualified by the question, how do we get to know what they know? What potential set of structures can be created to enable the dissemination of what is being learned? And are these questions all that different from ones that we have asked before?

I am not convinced that change processes have accelerated, but I am convinced that our perception of change has shifted. There is a need to examine the subjective space of change by developing a paradigm that can account for the layers of learning and experience that characterize a social space overwhelmed with the traffic in digitized information. 

Layers of learning, layers of experience — my terms here are very spatial, but I am also referring to time, the evolution of processes of change that incorporate previous models but often get co-opted by them. 

So, this is another thematic that would need exploration. I am interested in the way digital technologies shift the parameters of subjectivity as well as the representational tools that we use to interpret our daily lives, recreate the past or imagine the future. This would lead to a better historical understanding of the learning models that our society uses to justify the educational institutions that it supports. While we must be wary of the rapid shift to on-line and virtual spaces for learning, I believe it would be naïve to assume that this is a temporary change. Down the road we are looking at mixed environments for learning in general. The key is how and where can learners come to discuss and analyse their comprehension of what they have experienced? Cultural theory can play a definitive role in facilitating the dissection of learning paradigms by bringing research on visual cultures into the forefront of public discourse. There is perhaps no more important a moment than this one to resurrect the role of the public intellectual. Otherwise, the agenda for change will slip out of the hands of researchers and institutions that may be best suited to developing the very infrastructure that is needed to make a technology-driven environment effective for learning.
 

Dr. Ron Burnett
President
Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design
1399 Johnston Street
Vancouver
British Columbia
Canada V6H 3R9