Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the contexts of its use, electronic text is more immediately dialogic and communal
than print technology. Yet, as writing, it continues, unlike oral dialogue, to endure
over time and so it has the potential to support the disembedding of ideas from their
contingent contexts that Ong attributes to writing. If electronic writing does sup-
port the kind of “inner space” of reflection away from the contingencies of time and
physical context that Ong refers to, then this inner space is no longer the inert indi-
vidualized space generated by earlier writing and reading practices but a collective
and dialogic “inner space”.
Ong's account of the way in which communicative practices associated with
literacy led to the creation and deepening of individual inner space is applicable
to analyzing the impact of new communicative technologies, not as tools that are
internalized, but as new dialogic spaces that become part of the lifeworld of partic-
ipants. In a recent talk the educational ethnographer, David Barton, described how
he had put photos of the hills near his home in the North of England on Flickr and
received comments from other amateur photographers in Japan and Germany. After
that he described how he saw the same hills differently, as if through the eyes of
the Japanese and the German photographers he was in dialogue with. This story
illustrates how internet mediated dialogue can expand a space of reflection that is
both individual and collective, both situated and transcendent. In a similar way the
practice of blogging, for instance, can be a participation in a process of collective
reflection. Events seem different when they are seen not only through one's own
eyes but also through the eyes of the potential audience for one's blog. One course
in Exeter University is assessed entirely through mutually visible multimedia blogs
in a facebook-like web 2.0 environment and this has proved effective in creating a
motivating shared reflective space. The majority of students report that seeing the
views of others helps them to think and reflect and create new ideas.
Discussion and Conclusion
Both as a real shift in the foundations of economic and social life and as a vision
of the future, the idea of the emerging global knowledge age challenges traditional
approaches to education. New individual and collective skills and dispositions are
required for thriving in the knowledge age. These have been described in terms of
skills of communication, collaboration and creativity. Neither cognitive psychol-
ogy, based on the computer metaphor of mind, nor socio-cultural approaches based
on the metaphor of thinking as the use of cultural tools, can adequately account
for how to teach effectively for these knowledge age skills. Dialogic theory can
offer education a different vision which is a both trajectory of identity (like some
socio-cultural theory such as that of Lave and Wenger (1991)) and also, like more
rationalist and cognitivist accounts of education, a vertical development of thinking,
since the trajectory is movement into the space of dialogue itself. This trajectory of
learning is characterized by leaving behind narrow attachments and identities and
becoming more open to otherness, both the otherness of different voices and the
