ABSTRACT
Educational organisations and practices are being transformed by the introduction and ever-increasing use of information and communications technologies. Whereas education was once associated with the bringing together of teachers and students into classrooms, what Lankshear et al. (1996) refer to as ‘spaces of enclosure’, increasingly there are now possibilities for people to be distributed across vast distances, yet be interconnected through the use of technologies. Although this is not an entirely new phenomenon – people have been able to have telephone tutorials for many decades – there is something new in the density of possible interconnections and the fact that they are not simply one-to-one. There is the possibility for collaborative forms of learning, despite the greater potential for learners to be vastly distant from each other. Rather than face-to-face tutorials as a means to, at least in part, overcome the isolation of learning in more conventional forms of distance education, distributed learning provides important virtual contexts for interaction.
