Internet Learning Volume 5, Number 1, Fall 2016/Winter 2017 | Page 37

Internet Learning
4. We should attend to the materialities of digital education. The social isn’t
the whole story.
5. Openness is neither neutral nor natural: it creates and depends on
closures.
6. Can we stop talking about digital natives?
7. Digital education reshapes its subjects. The possibility of the ‘online
version’ is overstated.
8. There are many ways to get it right online. ‘Best practice’ neglects context.
9. Distance is temporal, affective, political: not simply spatial.
10. Aesthetics matter: interface design shapes learning.
11. Massiveness is more than learning at scale: it also brings complexity and
diversity.
12. Online teaching need not be complicit with the instrumentalisation of
education.
13. A digital assignment can live on. It can be iterative, public, risky, and
multi-voiced.
14. Remixing digital content redefines authorship.
15. Contact works in multiple ways. Face-time is over-valued.
16. Online teaching should not be downgraded into ‘facilita¬tion’.
17. Assessment is an act of interpretation, not just measurement.
18. Algorithms and analytics re-code education: pay attention!
19. A routine of plagiarism detection structures in distrust.
20. Online courses are prone to cultures of surveillance. Visibility is a
pedagogical and ethical issue.
21. Automation need not impoverish education: we welcome our new robot
colleagues.
22. Don’t succumb to campus envy: we are the campus.
Online can be the privileged mode.
Distance is a positive principle, not a
deficit. Sociology has given us the useful
concept of otherness. By establishing
an identity, a person or group automatically
defines those not in the group
as other. Within the sphere of higher
education, classroom instruction has
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