Kim McShane
The University of Sydney, Australia

Sending messages to a machine? Articulating ethe-real selves in blended teaching (and learning)

The purpose of this paper is to understand better academics' apparent preference for live, face-to-face lecturing in a period of technological choice and pedagogical change in university teaching and learning. The contributions and ideas in it are sourced from the data and writings of an on-going study researching academic identity and online teaching.

After I've visited them [the students in Singapore] and come back to Australia, the email I get, a) quantity and b) just the content and the manner in it, is totally different. Because now they know Seb, they know who Seb is and Seb is a normal human being. He's not something out there on the Internet - ethereal and non-contactable. … The message I get beforehand is that they,.. I mean they could be sending telegrams to the Queen, almost y'know? … it's almost as if you're an entity but you're not necessarily human like they are, I mean they could be just sending messages to a machine. [Seb]

Seb is one of 12 colleague-participants in a qualitative, interpretative research study investigating academic identity and online teaching. He was also one of a group of 'technology enthusiast' colleagues in an earlier phase of my work (McShane, 2004) who revealed a preference for retaining face-to-face teaching at the core of course design, a finding that parallels similar observations about students' preferences for face-to-face instruction and their disinclination for computer-mediated communication (Bayne & Land, 1999).

According to McWilliam (2004), teaching and learning online is one of several risky practices in higher education today that threaten to disfigure academic's work and identity. It represents, for many academics, the ultimate disorienting dilemma in higher education (Campbell-Gibson, 2000). Seb hints at this disorientation, saying that his students will 'miss something' if they don't come to his lectures. He goes on to reveals an underlying fear that, without face-to-face contact with his students, he may become, 'an entity… not necessarily human'. The prospect of becoming a machine - a cyborg academic, a tech(no)body teacher (McWilliam & Palmer, 1996) - clearly troubles Seb.

Nonetheless, he and other participants in my research are learning new modes of pedagogical being under the banner of 'blended teaching and learning', the contexts and practices of which straddle 'that imprecise boundary between the physical, and non-physical world' (Haraway, 1991).

Drawing on my analyses of participants' self-ascribed teaching metaphors, I will address the 'compulsion of proximity' (Boden and Molotch, 1994) on the part of the hybrid, blended academic who, while 'making the move' (Taylor, Lopez and Quadrelli, 1996) to online teaching, chooses to maintain 'traditional', on-campus face-to-face lectures and/or seminars.

Taking up relevant theories of self, presence/absence and ethics (and drawing on Levinas, Derrida and Irigaray), I work with a view of academic teacher identity as a discursive, ethical project in which teacher Self and student Other must needs articulate and negotiate them/selves in pedagogical contexts of presence (speech-based, embodied lectures and seminars) and absence (text-based, online communication environments).

References

Bayne, S. & Land, R. (1999) 'Computer mediated learning, synchronicity and the metaphysics of presence'. Proceedings of EDMedia 1999 World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications (AACE, 1999).

Boden, D. & Molotch, H. L. (1994) 'The compulsion of proximity'. In Friedland, R & Boden, D. (eds) (1994) NowHere Space, Time and Modernity. London, UK: University of California Press.

Campbell-Gibson, C. (2000) 'The ultimate disorienting dilemma: the online learning community'. In Evans, T. and Nation, D. (2000) Changing University Teaching: Reflections on creating educational technologies. London, UK: Kogan Page Ltd.

Haraway, D. (1991) 'A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century'. In Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. London, UK: Free Association Books.

McShane, K. (2004) 'Integrating face-to-face and online teaching: academics' role concept and teaching choices'. Teaching in Higher Education. 9 (1), 3-16.

McWilliam, E. (2004) 'Changing the academic subject'. Studies in Higher Education. 29(2), 151-163.

McWilliam, E. & Palmer. P. (1995) 'Teaching tech(no)bodies: open learning and postgraduate pedagogy'. In McWilliam, E. & Taylor, P. (eds) (1996) Pedagogy, Technology and the Body. New York: Peter Lang.

Taylor, P. Lopez, L. & Quadrelli, C. (1996) 'Flexibility, Technology and Academics' Practices: tantalising tales and muddy maps'. Canberra: Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs.