European Medi@Culture-Online http://www.european-mediaculture.org
Author: Husu, Jukka / Kynaeslahti, Heikki / Tella, Seppo.
Title: Towards the Recontext of the Virtual School.
Source: http://www.edu.helsinki.fi/media/mep8/Tella_Kynaslahti_Husu.pdf [30.09.2003]. Helsinki. P.1-19.
Published with kind permission of the authors.
Seppo Tella/Heikki Kynäslahti/Jukka Husu
Towards the Recontext of the Virtual School
The increased use of information and communication technologies to establish virtual educational environments has challenged people in the educational field to discuss what it is all about in these electronic creations called ‘virtual school’, ‘virtual classroom’, ‘virtual university’, and so on. In this article we aim to explore the Virtual School concept and virtuality, a phenomenon we believe lies behind virtual.
The school, traditionally, has been the place where teachers and students meet each other. It has been the setting where the institutional teaching/learning process takes place. We argue that it is time to move from traditional schools towards more diverse and elaborated forms of schooling that we call a virtual school in this article. This calls for considerations of both the context of present school and of the possible contexts, or recontexts, of virtual schools. We also argue that the emergence of the virtual school asks for understanding the paradigmatic change within the school institution both on the practical and on the conceptual level. We believe that by examining this phenomenon we can better understand the virtual school and foresee its development in the future.
Keywords: Virtual school; virtuality; information and communication technologies; school; teaching; learning; recontext.
Etymologically, the verb teach has two primary meanings: 1) to cause to know (how), especially by showing or instructing, and 2) to guide the studies of someone. Thus, teaching always implies acting in one way or another towards someone else. According to Ollivier (1992, 244–245), the teacher’s two major professional tasks are to communicate and to organise the activities students are intended to perform. Teaching can be regarded as a symbolic communicative process in which communication is directed towards evoking or eliciting responses from students. The teacher is a person able to mediate the intended meanings. This view emphasises the method of teaching or the how of teaching (Uljens 1995, 16).
The method of teaching can be contrasted with the content of teaching, i.e., with what aspects. According the view the teacher is “a person who knows”. In this tradition teaching appears to be more firmly related to the content than to the knowledge of methods. (Uljens 1995, 16–19) Teaching demands the teachers to be able to translate the ideas of content (what to teach) into practice (how to teach). The practice of teaching means balancing the two so that teachers can organise content knowledge into appropriate ways of teaching. This pedagogical know-how is a sort of pedagogical prerequisite that teachers cannot do without. In case the two views are not adequately balanced, the situation in schools, as well as in virtual schools, generally reflects ‘practice’ rather than ‘good practice’ (Loveless 1995). ‘Practice’ implies that modern information and communication technologies (MICT) are often used as an addition (simply as adds-on) to the conventional classroom instruction and consequently the practice of teaching will not change.
This is because there are strong pressures upon teachers to use MICT in response to the requirements of school authorities, the demands made by parents, and the national policies to promote technology in schools. These pressures can easily lead to a sort ‘how-to’ competence but simultaneously overlook some characteristics through which MICT can change the practice of schooling for both teachers and students (Loveless et al. 1997).
There exists a danger that the pedagogical nature and salient qualities of MICT can be lost if we have not posed the questions: what pedagogical purposes do MICT serve and how do these purposes differ between traditional schools and virtual schools? Accordingly, in this article, the what aspects of teaching primarily refer to the cognisance of the utility of MICT and their pedagogical applications. It is the knowledge that teachers need when they introduce MICT into their teaching.
‘Good practice’ does not deal uniquely with practical issues of managing to integrate MICT into the school context. Rather, it also deals with our beliefs and conceptions of what we regard as good and valuable. We agree with Alexander’s (1996) model of general pedagogy, according to which ‘good practice’ is an aspiration as much as an achievement; about dilemmas more than certainty, compromise rather than consensus. In fact, “‘good practice’ can never be singular, fixed or absolute, a specification handled down or imposed from above (of teachers or students) … it is plural, provisional and dynamic”. (Alexander 1996, 71) Alexander’s notion of good practice is also a related and shared practice: teaching is both conceptually and practically related to students. In teaching the concept of interaction with its various definitions also emphasises this view. As far as MICT are concerned, Hillman et al. (1994) give a comprehensive list of various definitions that consider interaction as the ‘fundamental element’, ‘key to the effective learning’, and as ‘defining characteristic of education’. In turn, teaching in traditional education is characteristically regarded as an interpersonal and interactive activity (cf. Anderson & Burns 1989, 9–12).
So far we have emphasised the primacy of practical events and actions in the interactive teaching/learning process. But these processes do not take place in isolation. Rather, teachers and students interact in the context of school. Their interactive life in classroom is connected with many ties to the world outside the school system. In fact, the word ‘context’ comes from Latin contextus, which means ‘joining together’ (Duranti & Goodwin 1992, 4). Therefore, it is crucial to pay attention to the power of context. Goodson & Mangan (1995) argue that we can understand events and develop a theory of events only if we also understand the context and the preactive assumptions that are an essential part of our actions.
According to Seddon (1995), changes in modern schooling are very much of a contextual nature. The milieu within which educational practice occurs is shifting considerably. The context of education is no longer anything that can be taken for granted, a background to something else that is more important. Instead, context is now in the forefront and draws educators’ close attention. That is why it is largely the context that defines what is ‘real’ and what is ‘relevant’ in teaching and learning that take place in schools. Seddon (1994, 36–37) speaks about practice-based contextualism, in which the relationship between the context and the people involved is understood as an ongoing, complex cultural encounter in which “we chunk up the world as a basis for research and everyday practice ... [and] this chunking up is a procedure shaped by distinctive frames of explanation, both formal and informal” (Seddon 1995, 401). Consequently, every phenomenon can be regarded as problematic. There are a lot of problematic events such as ‘education’, ‘school’, or ‘virtual school’ that cannot be simply observed and understood.
Constructivistic notions of teaching and learning have also paved the way to more extended views on context. They see the context both as actual and symbolic: it is a field for action and the medium within which individuals construct their understandings of the events and actions. For pedagogical practices this extended view of contextuality is worth noting. This stance emphasises that both the actions taken and the symbolic constructs made and used inform each other in order to comprise a larger holistic entity.
While continuing to discuss context, we now turn our attention from physical settings to virtual environments. The issue of virtuality is not restricted only to the present era or to the most advanced technology. Quéau (1995, 11, 18) states that virtuality brings us in a new way to the old questions about the essence of reality. The concept of virtuality refers to Duns Scotus, a metaphysician who lived in the Middle Ages. He used the term virtualiter to describe the relation between human experiences and the real harmonised entity of things. Scotus underlined that the construct of a thing does not contain its empirical properties formally (as if one could get information about a thing regardless of empirical observation, but virtualiter, i.e. in a virtual way (Heim 1995, 253). Heim speaks of virtuality as a bridge between a given environment and the additions to it by man. When compared to the natural state of affairs, the virtual state incorporates the informal equivalencies. (Heim 1995, 253.) As a metaphor, Heim presents a medieval Scholastic consideration of people as finite beings going on the paths of their life:
A finite being cannot see the things clearly that remain behind on the path nor the things that are going to happen after the next step. A divine being, on the contrary, is able to do it. God sees all at once and with a single glance all the paths and their events, gone and coming (Heim 1991, 69).
This interpretation leads us to possible worlds. Martin Kusch argues that the model of Duns Scotus deals with the simple idea that we can imagine our present world as an example of another world from what it actually is (Kusch 1988, 15). We can approach possible worlds in differing ways. We might think that they consist of the same elements as our present world. But instead of things being as they are they might be different, but still we could identify the existence of a possible world. There are, however, other approaches where the starting point is not our real world. We can imagine, as Kusch (1988, 39) does, that there are possible worlds which differ in radical ways from our real world. These kinds of possible worlds we cannot necessarily construct in our minds with familiar elements from our world. Kusch (1988, 40) continues to problematic the question of identities between various worlds: can one person be a member of several worlds? If any detail was different from the way things really are, could we still regard a person as the same person he or she really is? We can also think that a person might belong to various worlds while not being bound with his or her world. The most elegant answer, according to Kusch, to the question of identity between worlds is an intermediate one that would deal with the characteristic properties of both worlds. Even if we might not talk about identity between various worlds, we can, nevertheless, distinguish between essential and incidental properties of these worlds. We might also argue that while belonging to one world only, a human being might still have a counterpart in another world. With Quéau’s words we come back to the issue of virtuality. He proposes that virtuality brings people to a different reality which can be rational or irrational, logical or illogical, physical or fantastic (Quéau 1995, 16). In this article, this different reality is referred to as virtuality.
In the previous chapter we claimed that there are different kinds of possible worlds which can be evaluated according to the degree they represent the world familiar to us or how radically they differ from the reality as we know it. In addition to the concept of possible worlds we can also study virtuality through the criterion of as if. A virtual world is experienced as if it were a real world. There is a certain contradiction between these two aspects: 1) virtuality reflecting a basic reality (an aspect of as if) and 2) virtuality representing unknown and unfamiliar but possible worlds. In the following we will look into the processes of simulation using this bipolar approach.
The representation of reality through technology deals with simulation. In addition to the artificial scopes of the real world, fantastic surrealistic environments can be produced with simulation technologies. In post-modern writings, simulations are often regarded as typical features of today’s realm of life. Simon Penny (1996) speaks about the second phase simulation, where representation does not concern identical copies but deals with a new construction. Along with Penny (1996) it could be argued that art often imitates nature but claims that on several occasions nature does not lend itself to be presented through art; rather, it makes us reconstruct the organism in question.
Penny (1996, 192) also wonders whether it is an artist’s aim to simulate a real being or to create a feasible one. Here we go back to the essential properties mentioned by Kusch. Instead of simulations as if taken directly from the actual world, we can produce simulations that contain the essential properties of the things. The result still relates to a basic reality but at the same time it bears new qualities that differ from the world familiar to us. If we continue this kind of theorisation, we find the third stage of simulation where relation to reality tends to vanish, leading to the utmost stage of simulation called simulacrum. Baudrillard (1988) finds four successive phases of representation in simulation:
It is a reflection of a basic reality.
It masks and perverts a basic reality.
It masks the absence of a basic reality.
It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulation. (Baudrillard 1988, 170)
As we can see, Baudrillard’s picture of simulation is rather discouraging. Our intention, however, is not to investigate simulation and virtual environments as misconstructions of reality but as new possibilities for classroom and school. But indeed, simulation and virtual environments carry an aspect of decontextualisation as well as an aspect of recontextualisation. In a virtual world, familiar physical, social and cultural contexts of a real world fade away and become replaced by different characteristics that work in a virtual environment.
In the following, we will go deeper to this process of decontextualisation and recontextualisation.
In the research on virtual communities, MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) and MUSEs (Multi-User Simulation Environments) have been a popular theme. For instance, Elizabeth Reid (1995) argues that in this kind of environment the illusion of reality depends heavily on the degree to which MUD mediates between the user’s imagination.
“Virtual worlds exist not in the technology used to represent them nor purely in the mind of users but in the relationship between internal mental constructs and technologically generated representations of these constructs. The illusion of reality lies not in the machinery itself but in the user’s willingness to treat the manifestations of his or her imaginings as if they were real.” (Reid 1995, 166)
MUDs are “magical, text-based worlds where users can assume fluid, anonymous identities and vicariously experience intriguing situations cast in a dramatic format” (Dede 1995, 48). MUDs are gradually transforming into MUSEs, whose main objective is to share learning within the computer-based world.
It is essential that participants react to each other’s acts and that a person’s action produce the same kind of reactions as in the real world. Accordingly, we must talk about interaction. It is characteristic for a virtual environment that by acting and by being reacted to a human being can experience that he or she is in this virtual environment. As we saw above, Reid emphasises the users’ willingness to treat a virtual environment as a real one and the users’ capability to share their imagination with each other. Thus, experiencing the virtual environment as if it were a real authentic environment appears as a contract upon a mutual shared (virtual) reality made by a virtual community. Stone speaks about electronic networks as ‘a new manifestation of social space’, which can be ‘characterised as “virtual” space, an imaginary locus of interaction created by communal agreement’ (Stone 1991, 83–84).
When we go to a virtual environment, we step out of our familiar surroundings and cross a border to a strange world. We become estranged from our everyday lives that are replaced by circumstances and activities of a virtual environment. There is a certain aspect of liminality here. Thus it is not surprising that virtual environments have been investigated using anthropological ritual research. In his study David Tomas approaches cyberspace using Van Gennep’s concept of rites of passages and Turner’s examinations of liminality. He quotes Turner’s (1977, 97) statement about liminality as ‘a realm of pure possibility when novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise’ (Tomas 1991, 39). Tomas explains that “… ‘jacking in’ and out of cyberspace by a way of cyberdecks and matrix simulators suggest radically truncated version of separation and aggregation ‘rite’” in which the hardware serves as portal to, and exit from a parallel virtual reality” (Tomas 1991, 40).
“Who are we when we are on-line?”, asks Steven Jones in his study of virtual communities (Jones 1995, 15). Indeed, in a virtual environment people are able to change their character, their name, sex, age, nationality, personal history, etc., and even their humanity as the issue of cyborgs suggests (cf. Haraway 1991). As Tomas’ ideas in the previous chapter suggested, when attending a virtual world we withdraw from the context of our real life. Our being or existence becomes decontextualised. What comes in lieu of our ordinary existence is the recontext of a virtual environment. The question we should ask is: What is this recontext? It can possibly deal with reversed presentations of reality or endless circles of simulacra as Baudrillard proposes. However, we believe in more logical developments than Baudrillard’s hyperreality. Ferris investigated women’s on-line communication. She sees newsgroup discussions as a potential way for women to be emancipated from the gender related communication:
“... on-line communities can offer women a unique communication opportunity, allowing for the development and display of a distinct relational and cultural style” (Ferris 1996).
Reid speaks about new modes of interaction and new cultural formations in virtual environments. She points to the feebleness of cultural indicators of social position, age, authority and personal appearances in CMC context. Thus, they must be created with virtual replacements (Reid 1995, 166, 182).
Dahlén, Hannerz & Lindquist (1996) have investigated the character of translocal communities based on mutual interaction.
They analyse these communities as fields for anthropological research concluding that these translocal fields are not based on a physical environment but rather on a common idea and mutual interests. The existence of a translocal community is grounded on interaction between the participants indicating the common idea of the community. “Social space has replaced physical location as a metaphor where human interactions take place over electronic networks”, argues Cutler (1995) and continues: “Through discourse made possible by interactive media (CMC), individuals find or form groups that share interests.” He further argues that traditional communities based on location are fading away and distributed communities inhabited by distributed selves of persons in cyberspace keep replacing them. Many regard individualisation as responsible for circumscribing the activities of traditional organisations (school, organisations, and parties) in general. Personal development and growth are part of individualisation, and likewise this is a multilevel and multidimensional way of life, and not sequential, which applied to those generations who conducted their studies in industrial society. The principle is not simply to study full time; it is to study, live, work, and travel simultaneously and multidimensionally. This multidimensional way of life accentuating individualisation takes over younger and younger students, changing their attitudes towards school, university, and studying in general. The synchronised studying and becoming part of the labour market, idealised by the industrial society, is no longer a corresponding goal or norm as it was for the previous generations. All this intricately changes the basic principles of school activity. In fact, there is a strong undertone of existentialism in individualisation: the claim that a person only obtains his raison d’être by creating himself on his own, whether in the real world or in the virtual communities.
Hence, what is fundamental to virtual communities is the mutual interests the participants share and the interaction between them but based on individualised. These features are the essential properties that relate virtual communities to the real world. In a virtual environment, however, interaction is likely to become transformed and to reflect the recontext of a virtual community free from restrictions of physical world.
The virtual communities as depicted in the previous chapter owe a lot to the emergence of modern information and communication technologies (MICT), as they have laid the foundation for these virtual communities and in fact for the Virtual School concept we are referring to. In addition, and together with the latest developments in open and distance learning (ODL) tools, techniques and strategies, MICT are changing a lot in the working relationship between teachers and students. We argue that a radical conceptual change is about to take place in teaching as a result of the technological shift from traditional educational media, such as books, cassettes and videotapes, towards digital and telematic media, such as email, WWW, videoconferencing, telecommunications, teleservices, educational multimedia, and Virtual School. As early as 1987, Meeks called some of the initial technological approaches a ‘quiet revolution’, which would only seek access to different levels of education. We argue that this revolution is already here, calling for a careful analysis of the teacher’s role as a mediator between physical and virtual learning environments. Educationalists have become more cognisant of new virtual learning environments enabled by the emergence and implementation of modern information and communication technologies. Thus, the focus has been moving towards a holistic learning environment. These aspects will be underscored in this paper, which aims to focus on the learning process and on the elements construed in the learning setting with the help of modern technology. Virtual school is an information system based on new information and communication technologies, which is able to deal with most of the tasks of school without the need for a physical school building. Virtual school, thus, does not exist according to an ontological analysis as a concrete building with classrooms, office rooms, teachers, other staff, or pupils. It can be regarded as a real school, however, as it can support the basic activities of an ordinary physical school as indicated at the beginning of this paper. Virtual school is a logical extension of the use of computers in teaching. (Paulsen 1987; Blystone 1989; Paulsen & Rekkedal 1990; Tella 1992; Tella 1995; Tiffin & Rajasingham 1995) We can thus regard virtual school defined narrowly as by definition approaching the ideas of Illich (1972) about a school without a building but still connected to society. Similar ideas have been presented by Dalin (1989) when imagining the school of the year 2020, and wondering whether the classroom of the future can be limited by four walls, or does the classroom mean the nearby industry, home, the media world, or world reality.
Alvin Toffler (1981) was one of the first to warn that schools would not remain intact under the pressure of an information society. In the 1980s, several futurologists (e.g. Spitzer 1987; Stonier 1988) predicted that the position of school would change so that instead of being at school, students would also study in out-of-school contexts with the aid of interactive video recordings, computer systems and multilateral information nets. These opinions anticipated the emergence of a Virtual School.
In an industrial society, schools and universities were simply regarded as buildings, like factories, hospitals or concert halls. The information society is tearing down the walls of schools; the school is no longer a mere building; it is a learning centre intricately connected with the surrounding society thanks to the various tools of the information society. As a consequence of global networking, schools become part of a network culture, one of the examples of network learning and know-how.
As education in industrial society used to mean qualifying for a clear-cut profession or job in a synchronic period of time, in an information and networking society education is more of an attitude of self-development. The need for lifelong learning is accepted as a fact. This naturally moves the focus from pedagogics, children’s education, towards andragogics, adult education. Some of the problems schools are now facing may result from the fact that it has been clinging to its former authority in the eyes of pupils, without acknowledging or yielding to societal change, unable to become an information and networking society school.
The traditional view of school as a central place of learning has lost some of its validity. The increased utilisation of international communications networks, the Internet in particular, at home, work and school, has created a situation where part of teaching and learning has moved outside the physical school. This development has been accelerated by the expansion of flexi-mode teaching in many countries. Boyd (1987) sees three kinds of new educational opportunities through computer-mediated human communications systems. First, epistemological viewpoints, connected to discursive flexibility facilitated by computer-mediated communication. Second, affiliative viewpoints, which provide learners with new opportunities for peer tutoring and for establishing long-term affiliations between students and their school/ teachers, or among students as well as between various institutes of different walks of life. Third, the physical flexibility offered by CMHC gives new opportunities for students to study in more convenient places and at more convenient times. (Boyd 1987, 150–151)
Independence of time and place and historical neutrality is central to the concept of virtual school. In this paper, virtual school is also extended to cover different alternatives of symbiosis with physical school, not only the virtual school proper. The virtual school can work as a virtual extension of ordinary school or classroom activity, thus enabling new possible worlds and environments of learning. The concept does not thus exclusively emphasise geographic or temporal distance, even though it has to be seen as an implicit potential. The concept of virtual school emphasises collaborative learning and shared expertise as well as students’ shared interests in learning.
If we regard virtual school as a symbiotic extension of ordinary school, part of the activities of physical school may be moved to virtual school and carried out there with the aid of information and communication technologies. Conceptually, active utilisation of the new means of communication provided by the new technology approaches the functional core of virtual school.
In the following, we compare an ordinary school with a virtual school. We try to take into account the same criteria we started this paper with when characterising a “traditional” school. Virtual school outdoes the traditional school in organising the students’ school work, as it can operate around the clock and in all seasons. According to Rekkedal & Paulsen (1989), virtual school will probably be able to fulfil all professional, educational, administrational and social functions of the school organisation, although some of the tasks of the traditional school system are omitted (school catering, health services, etc.).
Virtual school promotes collaborative learning and it also brings different stages of education closer to each other. More importantly, virtual school can operate as the central communication forum for life-long learning. Virtual school is likely to link experts from various walks of life with the activities of the school, by creating an innovation forum for teachers, students and parents alike, which is expected to intensify collaborative interaction (e.g., Tella 1995, 156–157). According to Negroponte (1991), its independence of time and space is the single most valuable service and product which information technologies can provide for humankind. In virtual school this independence is clearly connected with educational goals.
In addition to virtual school, the same kind of learning environment utilising telematics is referred to as ‘electronic education’, ‘electronic classroom’, ‘electronic college’, ‘electronic campus’, ‘on-line education’, ‘computer-assisted teleconferencing’ (cf. e.g. Harasim 1987, 118; Henri 1992; Hernes & Haugen 1993). The term virtual classroom goes back to Roxanne Hiltz referring to the use of CMC “to create an electronic analogue of the communications forms that usually occur in a classroom including discussion as well as lectures and tests” (Hiltz 1986, 95). It appears that ‘Virtual Classroom’ is also a trademark of New Jersey Institute of Technology (Harasim 1990, xiii). Paquette, Bergeron & Bourdeau (1993, 642) apply the concept of virtual classroom more widely, extending it to cover tools for facilitating cooperative working, distance use of multimedia documents, and a knowledge-based information system aimed at pupils. Tiffin & Rajasingham (1995, 10) speak of virtual class and contend that virtual class(room) is not an electronic simulation of conventional classroom. Tiffin & Rajasingham define their virtual class in the following way: “The idea of a virtual class is that everybody can talk and be heard and be identified and everybody can see the same words, diagrams and pictures, at the same time” (Tiffin & Rajasingham 1995, 6). The aspect of community is obvious in virtual class. “The virtual class is a meeting place for virtual communities of learners with a shared interest in the same subject” (Tiffin & Rajasingham 1995, 177).
Terminology appears to be still under a debate, though most of the terms refer to similar applications of technology in education. Whatever term we use, it seems obvious that the virtual school concept implies and includes elements, features or characteristics of possible worlds that differ from our real world. A virtual school is not identical with the school we are used to seeing as and taking for a school; rather, it is this kind of school’s possible counterpart. Based on our arguments earlier in this paper, we find it appropriate to contend that a virtual school or a virtual class(room) includes those elements of school we are familiar with. Yet, at the same time, a virtual school means something more and it brings something extra(ordinary) we cannot expect from traditional school classes. In this anticipation, virtuality serves as a mediator between the “old” familiar school and the plurality of possible schools unknown to us.
What was said about the recontext of virtual communities mostly holds true with virtual school as well. The context of physical school and the realm of students’ everyday lives become decontextualised. What is left of real life, are the essential qualities of a school: educational needs and interests of students and interaction between all participants pointing to answering these needs and interests (Kynäslahti 1997). This interaction is revitalised with new kinds of characteristics in the recontext of a virtual school influenced by widened spatial and temporal possibilities. As a form of virtual community, there are opportunities in virtual school to develop new kind of “sociality” and new kinds of educational cultures firmly based on the emerging information society and on the new communication culture about to be born. On this occasion, the educational needs of those whose access to education usually is rather limited, including women in many countries, ethnic minorities, and rural people, are fairly likely to become fulfilled or even emphasised (Kynäslahti & Stevens 1996).
The virtual interaction as it can be expected to take place in a virtual school is computer-mediated interaction but shared between the participants in the teaching/learning process. We conclude that mediation is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite that enables the teacher to create a virtual learning environment. The fact remains that the interaction, though shared and therefore serving as a basis for a common experience, is no longer a hic et nunc type of interaction, taking place on the spot. In ordinary school classes, interaction is primarily immediate and ‘on the spot’, often leading to practical or matter-of-fact communication between teachers and students.
In computer-mediated virtual interaction, the communication process is based on a series of individual(ised) and autonomous decisions each participant has to perform in order to follow up what precedes the communication act. Mediated interaction, however, is not a simulation of interaction;
it is a shared or joint interaction which might result in a feeling of shared expertise in a community of learners. It must also be borne in mind that experiences sensed or felt on the network are far from isolating experiences; rather, they can be exceedingly electrifying and felt as real.
In a virtual, networked communicative interaction, an individual can be more firmly in touch with his or her teacher than in a conventional yet tangible learning situation in a “traditional” classroom. This is due to an enhanced phenomenological- experiential level a learner can achieve from being fully committed to the virtual experience. In short, a shared feeling of expertise or a network-based experience is deeply grounded on the mutual interaction between teacher and student mediated with the aid of modern telecommunication tools.
As Ollivier (1992) put it, all teaching boils down to communication. We believe that a new communication culture is about to be born. It is deeply rooted in transferring and experiencing an enhanced interaction in a socially different habitat based on an information exchange system made possible by MICT and ODL and called a virtual school in this paper. So it is just fair to conclude that the new network-based communication culture is being born on the basic elements of computer-mediated virtual learning environments. Teaching in this new environment means a conceptual enlargement of both time and space, independence of ‘hic et nunc’ and ‘on the spot’ but not a decrease of any social dimensions grounded on new kinds of experiential elements that have not been possible before. In short, virtual learning environments imply emancipation from restrictions caused by conventional learning environments that a traditional classroom represents.
From what we have said and from what we have personally experienced we feel tempted to draw a few albeit provisional conclusions.
First, we are witnessing a paradigmatic change in the ways we should or are expected to see our learning environments. The change is radical in many respects. It is not only a pragmatic and tangible shift from traditional in-school learning environments to virtual, out-of-school “recontextualised” social contexts and computer-mediated learning environments represented by the Virtual School concept. It also concerns the existence proper when we take into account all possible worlds created by new virtual environments. Second, this change is firmly grounded on global networking and more generally, on globalisation. Globalisation in education means not only free access to information and to international communications networks but also to communities of learner, thus leading to a high-profile expansive idea of a worldwide school as a contrast to the traditional school the industrial society thought of.
Third, the change is conceptual as most communication is mediated and human beings are obliged to take the “mediation factor” into account. The medium is still the message, i.e., the message tends to get mediated through the medium used in the communication act. The virtual communities, on the other hand, stand for something extra as far as communication and mediation are concerned. They represent something out of the ordinary, something amplified or intensified, new possible worlds in which people can act differently than they do in the real world. This if anything is bound to change both communication, culture, and school. We believe it is only fair to argue that based on new communication facilitated by modern technology, a new educational culture is being created. Probably we should be talking about a revolution.
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