What kind of education is not distance education?

Abstract

The present work results from critical reflections about educational practices influenced by Information Technology (IT), in particular those which constitute the learning method known as Distance Education (DE). My purpose is both to problematize and to discuss how new understandings of space-time inspired by IT and its social effects are expressed in the production of subjectivities as result of DE practices. These problematizations are created using the conceptual tool distance, which gains visibility with the rise of this educational method in various time and places in instructor relationships. Our main focus moves beyond looking at distance in the spatial or geographical sense that IT sustains, to view distance as (temporal) duration, posing questions about time in relation to learning. We will attempt to understand the transition taking place as distance no longer occurs in space. The learning process happens in time, time which is now divorced from movement.