The Temporal Dimensions of E-Learning

Abstract

Time has been included as a crucial explicative factor in many of the most influential learning theories which have emerged since the last century. Although the idea of time has not always been considered in the same way, almost all the approaches that have dealt with educational phenomena have incorporated time as a key issue. This is true in approaches as different as the behaviourism of Skinner (1968), the genetic epistemology of Piaget (1980), the cultural psychology of Vygotsky (1978), or the didactics of Carroll (1984), just to enumerate some of them. With the emergence and distribution of digital media, and with the introduction of these media in educational contexts, educational scientists face some interesting challenges related to the role of time in educational processes. Thus, the mediation of digital media has transformed the very nature of educational processes (Harasim, 2000) and time is one of the most deeply transformed aspects in learning processes. This important incidence of digital media on time poses several challenges to be addressed by social scientists and educational researchers. In this special issue we focus mainly on two of these important challenges: 1. How digital media challenge the notion of time itself and how time can be understood in this digital era. 2. How the digital affordances of time influence educational dialogue. We are pleased to present in this issue nine articles: four mainly addressing the first challenge, and five mainly addressing the second. The first four articles discuss the meaning and the nature of the notion of time. Thus, the article by Terras and Ramsay, entitled ‘A Psychological Perspective on the Temporal Dimensions of E-learning’, distinguishes between physical time and psychological time. The authors then discuss psychological time in greater depth and, from this discussion, the authors identify several challenges which e-learning poses for learners’ psychological time, as well as a set of skills necessary to address these challenges. The article by Shaw, entitled ‘Heidegger and E-learning: overthrowing the traditions of pedagogy’, examines this same distinction between physical and psychological time through the lens of Heidegger, and proposes the concept of ‘care’ as overcoming this ontological dichotomy. The article by Mathew, ‘E-learning, Time and Unconscious Thinking’, focuses again on psychological time and tries to examine and explain its nature by using some of Freud’s explanatory concepts. The article by Gourlay, entitled ‘Creating Time: students, technologies and temporal practices in higher education’, takes a more empirical approach to the notion of time and tries to describe, based on focus groups and longitudinal multimodal journaling, how e-learners understand and experience time in their digitally mediated practices. The other five articles in the issue address the second challenge mentioned earlier: they examine how time intervenes in online dialogue and interaction. Thus, the article by Oztok, Wilton, Lee, Zingaro, MacKinnon, Makos, Phirangee, Harwood, Brett and Hewitt, named ‘Polysynchronous: dialogic construction of time in online learning’, challenges the traditional timebased distinction in online dialogue between synchrony and asynchrony, and proposes viewing online interaction through the concept of polysynchrony, which overcomes that traditional