ABSTRACT
The counter-positioning of virtual learning environments with traditional face-to-face learning has given rise to comparisons in which cyberspace education is represented as somehow inauthentic, as a relatively impoverished experience located within a cold, even sterile medium. Recent commentaries (for example, Dreyfus 2001) have explored the notion that a compelling explanatory factor in this perceived lack of intensity might be the absence of risk, as experienced by both students and teachers. In this analysis, risk carries an affective intensity that is integral to embodiment, physical presence and the visibility of the teacher and the students. Moreover such intensity and authenticity are seen as crucial to the possibility of learner commitment, and other forms of social and ethical engagement. The absence, or diminished possibility, of such encounters in online environments renders what one does in cyberspace as having no ‘real’ consequences. This chapter will critically examine such claims and the extent to which online learning environments may be seen to minimise risk through mechanisms of control. Attributes of online environments, such as asynchronous time for reflection, relative anonymity, compartmentalisation of activity, controlled access through user-authentication, sophisticated surveillance and tracking tools would all seem to signal as much. Indeed it might be argued that online environments share certain properties with all simulacra or spectral phenomena – theme parks, televised sport, packaged holidays, computer gaming, etc. – in that they serve, apparently, to minimise risk and threat. The chapter will seek to problematise such notions and examine the possibility that learning in cyberspace, rather than being comparatively risk-free, contains risks and disquietudes that are qualitatively different. Similarly it will caution against what I have termed here the ‘incorporeal fallacy’ of assuming that cyberlearning is, indeed, disembodied. Rather it will argue the need to reconsider how notions of risk, the subjectivity of the learner and ideas of embodiment might all be differently constituted online.
