Play, Things, Rules, and Information: Hybridized Learning in the Digital University

Abstract

The term “hybrid learning” has recently been appropriated by the distance learning movement to delineate the features of a specific type of educational experience that blends traditional lecture and Socratic discussion with online computer mediated instruction. In many ways, however, this “hybridity” only reinforces traditional boundaries between learner and teacher, learner and learner, and teacher and teacher, because this kind of courseware-driven pedagogy ultimately only reifies certain ideologies of late capitalism oriented around efficiency, modularity, linearity, and surveillance in which the interfaces of so-called learning management systems are structured like a conventional teacher’s grade-book, and spontaneous forms of improvisation made possible by the unexpected connections facilitated by a course syllabus and particular aggregations of students are constrained by highly scripted interactions.