To be or not to be: Social justice in networked learning

Abstract

The potential for more egalitarian or democratic forms of engagements among people is accepted to be somehow actualised naturally within collaborative or cooperative forms of learning. There is an urgent need for a theoretical framework that does not limit social justice with access or participation, but focuses on the otherwise hidden ways in which group work can yield suboptimal outcomes. This article aims to expand the current understandings of social justice in networked learning practices by challenging the ways in which online subjectivities are conceptualised in communal settings. It is argued that the mediated experience in online spaces should be conceptualised in tandem with one's social presence and social absence if education is to be studied more rigorously and if claims of justice are to be made in networked learning.