The Disruptive Potential of e-Learning in Academe and Beyond: A Futuristic Perspective

摘要

E-learning theory and practice have been heavily focused on e-learning as a tool, medium and space of formal instruction. This paper is an invitation to think of e-learning beyond the domain of education, and to consider its implications for social stability and the standing of knowledge in the emerging e-knowledge society. This paper adopts a futuristic stance, and sets itself a dual objective. The first is to distinguish two types of e-learning: academic e-learning, and the extra-academic, serendipitous, unbounded, social e-learning. The second is to characterize and imagine the corresponding levels of change these two types of e-learning are and will be introducing into our future learning practices, concepts of knowledge, and social realities. This paper rests on a review of the literature on formal, academic e-learning with focus on the transformations this type of e-learning generates at the level of pedagogy, the sense of community among students and the standing of knowledge. Subsequently, the transformations registered at the level of academic e-learning are transposed and extrapolated into the type of informal, didactically-unmonitored, social e-learning, to gauge their anticipated nature and degree. This paper recognizes the important repercussions of e-learning on traditional learning and the shift in the source of knowledge from traditional cartels to more distributed, more egalitarian social media-driven networks. Exploration of the emerging, unbounded, social e-learning trends seem to lead to a destabilised social situation where formerly-acknowledged and socially-sanctioned reference points are weakened to give way to a plethora of truths, realities and representations.