Weller (2006), ‘The distance from isolation: why communities are the logical conclusion in e-learning’

I enjoyed reading this article and it confirmed a lot of what I thought and also grounded it. It also introduced some new ideas to me. I agreed more of less to what Weller said, but put me in mind of social identity as an individual and how we consume IT. We do this on a number of levels and my guess it that education that takes on Elearning for promotion should keep this in mind. We consume education the way we do must things these days so.... Anyway to respond to the questions set:

To what extent do you agree with the central hypothesis that the technological features of the internet are reflected in the social features, and can it be extended to other technologies?
Yes, I agree with this hypothesis. The need for people to be opinionated and stand out is illustrated in Blogs and Newsgroups. The fact people have always tried to communicate fast illustrated by the use of fast (and frequently fresh) horses, the fact the fastest runners were used at Gallipoli. People want communication and they want it now. So email is a form of that. It needs to be robust or else it is not reliable (new horses, the breeding of pigeons that were good at homing).

I agree with the aspect of symbolisation not being underestimated. People need to feel connected and it works well. I can think of examples of voting, the thought we all go to the polls on the same day to make a change (or not) in who we allow to control our services (bit idealistic, but the thought it there). Again a herd attitude is a human trait from football upwards and it is what drives our economy – culture

Culture while it is influenced by technology and can over time change (the car I think is a good example, and within IT think of the mobile phone and how this has changed people’s habits and expectations). I think also the IT is influenced by the culture in the first place (I think Stuart Hall calls this the cultural circuit – where aspects of culture feed into the initial design but as culture modifies so does the design of the object).


If the hypothesis is valid, then to what extent does it reflect a social or technological determinism?
I think this is too simplistic, I think is a mix of the two. The IT represents society or how society would like to be. It taps into our identity and is produced for us to become consumers of it in someway. This in tern is sometimes regulated formally (the train carriages that ask you not to use your phone); it is sometimes informally regulated (parents who allow some form of internet access but not all). It is then re-consumed and re-identified. All this is socially determined but intertwined with the IT. For me no one element can be highlighted as being unique and isolated.