Rural South African Teachers “Move Home” in an Online Ecology

Abstract

This chapter presents a narrative of six rural South African teachers’ first encounter with e-learning, showing how they learned to act in an ecology that required new epistemological tools. The purpose of the chapter is to address the dominant discourse in educational information and communication technology by giving a glimpse of the lived experience of the research participants who took first steps in crossing the digital divide. These first experiences have shown clearly how the online curriculum needs to be redesigned in order to capture the lifeworld of the students as scaffold for entering the online community. They began to develop both technologies of mind and of hand, challenging their existing learning conventions and they discovered, if only emergently, howto be part of a distributed cognition system. They also learned how to improvise in situated cognition situations (Brown, 2000; Nardi, 1996: 69-98), fashioning emergent ecologies of learning in the process. The main findings of the inquiry pertained to the way the teachers experienced this epistemological and pedagogical shift. They sawthe process of learning to e-learn as a “move” or a relocation of their cognitive activity, while at the same time also situating their learning in a supportive social setting. They had indeed begun to make the “move”, but the process had only started, and they were struggling with many of the same issues that challenged them in advanced degree studies in conventional face-to-face situations; they continued to desire linearly structured curricula with fixed parameters of content and prescribed processes of engagement.