ENGAGING WITH E-LEARNING: EMERGING EPISTEMOLOGIES AND INCREASED PEDAGOGIC VISION IN HIGHER EDUCATION (original) (raw)

This paper reports on part of a larger inquiry at a Higher Education Institution (HEI) into how engagement with elearning manifests itself in change in epistemology and pedagogy of lecturers in an Education Faculty. We explore possible reasons for varying engagement with e-learning, assuming that these reasons are located within the dimensions of the unit of analysis of the study, namely, lecturers' changing theories of knowledge and teaching in first encounters with e-learning. We argue that although lecturers delve into the 'shallow waters' of e-learning they do not do so in sufficient depth and resign themselves to the perpetuation of cognitivist, behaviourist and objectivist forms of knowledge without discovering more about the medium that could possibly liberate their restricted epistemologies. Moreover, those lecturers who experience epistemological and pedagogical change will develop and fill, if only emergently, some form of niche in their work environment. In doing so they begin to exemplify what refer to as "keystone species" in the establishment of learning and information ecologies in their workplace. Excerpts from personal narratives highlight the epistemological and pedagogical changes of nine such lecturers.