Fry and Love (2011) ‘Business lecturers’ perceptions and interactions with the virtual learning environment’

A recent article suggests lecturers’ uses of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are conservative, in the sense that VLEs are used primarily as repositories, and are not used to re-imagine learning and teaching. The lecturers’ approach to VLEs seems to be based on a frequent perception that VLEs are axiomatically inferior to face-to-face interaction.

Fry and Love (2011) conducted interviews with Business lecturers, and provide commentary thereon. One of the significant things about the article is the metaphors used to describe VLEs, variously described as ‘security blanket’, ‘crutch’, or an ‘electronic filing cabinet’ (p.54). The metaphors are conservative because they see online learning as supportive, covering holes (another metaphor) in face-to-face provision, but not rivalling it in efficacy, or offering alternative learning and teaching paradigms.

The lecturers interviewed saw the VLE as providing a valuable function for students with other commitments, in that VLEs allowed students access to learning materials outside office hours, but, and consequently, they saw the VLE is a one-way communication medium, despite the potential of VLEs to enable two-way communication.

A further issue with VLEs is that some lecturers were reluctant to make their learning materials available online. There may be valid reasons for this practice, but, from an Activity Theory perspective, the division of labour is also relevant here, as the relative positions of lecturer and student are reaffirmed when a potential tension arises between the two (a potential tension because students can access learning materials without the lecturer being explicitly positioned as gatekeeper). An existing Activity System remains intact, but not necessarily to the benefit of learning and teaching. Fry and Love suggest the lecturers’ practice is a Behaviourist position, and predicated on the idea that learning is acquired, not constructed.

The research might suggest that lecturers are using VLEs in unimaginative ways, using VLEs to support and insure existing pedagogies, rather than prompting a rethink of learning and teaching. Alternatively, the research could be exposing the limitations of VLEs. The VLE as a learning technology functions well as a content repository, but online conversation tends to happen more enthusiastically via social networking technologies (Facebook, Twitter, et al.). This imbalance may be the result of the successful marketing of social networking technologies, or may have emerged through practice, or it may signify a limitation in the VLE as a learning technology, and perhaps suggest a design flaw in VLEs, too. Users go to the HEI’s website, then go through a different log-in procedure for their VLE, then access a discussion board via a menu. Meanwhile, they can go onto Facebook or Twitter and conduct all their social and academic conversations from one platform. Lecturers may not be using VLEs imaginatively, but VLEs may be designed and implemented in ways that discourage innovation.

Reference

Fry, N. and Love, N. (2011) ‘Business lecturers’ perceptions and interactions with the virtual learning environment,’ International Journal of Management Education, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 51-56.

Communities of Practice: Engestrom (2007?) and Jones (2004)

Engestrom (2007?) criticises the Community of Practice theory as ‘wishful’ and ‘foundationally conservative’ in its construction of a centripetal journey from the periphery to the centre of learning communities. For Engestrom, the Community of Practice theory ‘marginalizes the creation of novelty.’ Engestrom argues that the Community of Practice theory works against creativity by having a pre-ordained path from the periphery to the centre. The centre of the Community of Practice thus comprises a centre of gravity, to which all activity moves. Innovative activities cannot be well accommodated within a Community of Practice unless the innovation is reformed to suit the Community’s pre-existing identity (remembering that identity formation is seen as a defining characteristic of learning within the Community of Practice framework). 

Jones (2004) sees the Community of Practice in more complex terms, drawing upon Wenger’s (1998) work on constellations of practice, whereby a number of communities interact, but in a looser formation than in the core Community of Practice framework. Hence, an H.E.I. or a workplace may have numerous separate Communities of Practice aligning to a range of sub-cultures. There is an overarching organisational goal, and hence the communities are connected within a constellation, but each individual community within the constellation will have its own identity norm. 

Engestrom’s overall analysis is defined by tensions between individual nodes within an activity system. Wenger’s model is less characterised by tension, as there is a centre towards which the subject moves. The Community of Practice model does give a structure and a vocabulary to an established form of learning, and thus it can be abstracted and applied to new contexts, allowing the reformation of learning within an historically tried and tested framework. However, the Community of Practice model can also appear to bleach organisations of their inevitable tensions, and thus the Community of Practice theory ceases to align with people’s day to day experiences of their places of work and study. Interestingly, a similar critique of Engestrom’s work was made by Avis (2009) who saw Engestrom’s idea of co-configuration (the identifying, highlighting and resolution of tensions) as a ‘management technique’ (p.161), designed to smooth tension rather than expose tension’s full, systematic implications. Therefore, both the Community of Practice theory and Activity theory can be interpreted as conservative frameworks. The conservative or radical nature of theories is thus not an intrinsic feature of a theory, but an approach that emerges through practice. Theories are pliable, and can comprise tools within larger activity systems.

References

Avis, J. (2009) ‘Transformation or transformism: Engestrom’s version of activity theory?’ Educational Review, vol. 61, no. 2, pp. 151-165.

Engestrom, Y. (2007?) ‘From communities of practice to mycorrhizae’ http://www.open.ac.uk/cetl-workspace/cetlcontent/documents/476902341f33c.pdf (accessed 5 December 2011)

Jones, C. (2004) ‘Networks and learning: communities, practices and the metaphor of networks – a response,’ ALT-J, Researching Learning Technology, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 195-198.

Wenger, Etienne (1998, repr. 2005), Communities of Practice,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.