Spatialities and online teaching: To, from and beyond the academy

Abstract

"Hello! Is anyone out there?" might be the echo of many an online lecturer, but perhaps a louder echo might be in the question "Hello! Where are you in the educational landscape?" For our locations and spatialities are inevitably entangled with who we are and who we might become. We are always emplaced (Malpas, 1999), and so in the changing pedagogical spaces of academe, I argue that spatialities are inextricably linked with identity performances and teaching practices - these configure and are configured by each other. In the postmodern university, online spaces are changing traditional academic life. As Lefebvre puts it "to change life is to change space; to change space is to change life" (Merrifield, 2000: 173). This paper explores transformations in online teaching in terms of identity, spatiality and online teaching practices in the everyday experiences of online lecturers using the socio-material lens of Actor-Network-Theory. Drawing from a larger qualitative ethnographic study within an Australian university, the experiences of 4 online lecturers are discussed in terms of (re)configurations of their identities, teaching practices and spaces/places (physical and online), as well as their evolving online teaching metaphors; relating to the conference themes of: "What are the changing relationships between people, the virtual and the physical, and objects in the educational technology landscape?"; and "What does it mean to be an online scholar in the educational technology landscape - who, what, when, where, how and why?" (ascilite, 2008). It is concluded that these conceptual and empirical insights can enrich our understanding of online teaching transformations in terms of identity and spatiality in shifting pedagogical landscapes - to, from and beyond the traditional places of the academy. © 2008 Reem Al-Mahmood.