Distance Education in Transition - Master of Distance Education ...

A Pedagogical Model for Using Virtual Learning Spaces
and depth. It is susceptible to interference. The flow of subjective feeling is diluted and
interrupted. All this can in fact be the case even if the participants allegedly like and
approve of this form of communication.
Teaching and learning is no longer "experienced" globally as a unit consisting of space,
time and ritualised social interaction. This is why learning experience cannot be "localised"
and float, so to speak, in the indeterminate. The spatial and temporal contextualisation,
which is so important for learning, is lost. The much-quoted expression "lost in hyperspace"
(e.g. Klimsa, 1997, p. 15; Tergan, 1997, p. 133; Haack, 1997, p. 155) refers to this.
The original and the authentic are not experienced. People, objects, and often situations,
are simply copies which can be repeated often. With their help we can only construct a
secondary, derived teaching and learning reality. The "aura" is lost, as with technical
reproductions of works of art.
These are serious losses. They reduce, surround, parcel out, spoil or destroy experiences
gained at school or university. For this reason, it may be concluded, learning in virtual
space will never be able to replace completely teaching in real spaces. Systems of
teaching and learning will have to be designed in which the two methods complement
and involve each other. To do this however, the forms of teaching and learning in real
spaces will be forced to change in the sense of increased direct and personal
communication and collaboration with reduced presentations of contents. In particular,
emphasis will have to be placed on maintaining "social intercourse" (Casper, 1996, p. 25).
Losses of this nature are regretted by most people, in particular by those who are still
more or less rooted in the bourgeois culture of our industrial age. However, we are at a
turning-point: the world is going digital. People in the coming information era will differ
from those in the industrial era in the same way that the latter differed from those in the
agricultural era. Paradigm changes, changes in values and completely new experiences
will bring about new insights, attitudes and habits. Essential activities will in any case
take place increasingly in virtual space, including learning in higher and continuing
education. Such people will probably regard these losses in a manner different to ours.
� Gains of Pedagogical Substance
When students grow up in the digital world, a new world will be opened up to them in
learning, playing, working and dealing with many other, often unknown, persons, as
Sherry Turkle (1998) has described so convincingly. They will live and learn alternately
in real and virtual spaces. Both will have different effects on the formation, alteration
and protection of their identity. Virtual spaces in fact offer possibilities which are not
found in real spaces. According to Winfried Marotzki (1998), we will be faced with
phenomena such as "disinhibition", gender swapping, the development of multiple
identities, and with an experimental "construction and reconstruction of the self".
Previously unexplored dimensions of the development of the person will open up. What
the significance of these completely phenomena for cultural history may be is seen in
Marotzki's assessment according to which the image of the "patchwork of one's own
identity" which is occasionally used in the post-modern discourse has become "virtual
reality" in the new spaces. There is no doubt that we are dealing here with important
aspects of the new learning spaces.
104