In five years’ time, Second Lifers and Facebookers will look back at our current internet exploits and be astonished at our primitive stumblings across the cultural terrain. We always fumble about in new environments (particularly online ones, it seems), because we discharge old mindsets and habits to help us make meaning out of novel phenomena; that’s just the nature of things — no-one’s to blame 
Tara Brabazon’s Digital Hemlock: Internet education and the poisoning of teaching was first published in 2002. Reading it six years later (or four years, if you’ve got the same 2004 reprint that I have), it provides an intriguing aperture into how things have changed in the online world, and how we try to make sense of cultural flux using concepts already familiar to us.
Brabazon’s case was that economic rationalism, consumerism and reduced government funding were the drivers behind the insistence that courses go online — you know, efficiency gains and all that. Brabazon points to the labour-intensiveness of internet-based technologies, the “bland, unforgiving educational platforms” (d’accord!) of Web$CT and Black$Board, and the leap-frogging of critical and higher-order thinking skills that these technologies subsidise. This was true at the time, and may still be to a certain extent.
However, post-Web 2.0, there is something else going on, and the habitat has changed. In the first instance, we are seeing massive and definable shifts in culture. The imperative now is to embrace technologies in our teaching not primarily for efficiency or for economic reasons, but because we need to be where our students are and we need to take them where they will need to be if they are to be energetic, sophisticated, knowledgeable participants in a communications society.
Secondly — thankfully! — online tools are much easier for teachers to use these days (except, of course, for the positively awful Web 1.0 systems such as Black$Board, Web$CT and My$Classes, that many institutions insist their distressed and beleagured teachers use, but that’s another story … *). As teachers begin to make use of collaborative and participatory online instruments such as blogs, wikis, social networking, and the like, more energy can be devoted to the bigger picture stuff we want our students to demonstrate: critical thinking, interpretation, validation, synthesis, evaluation, analysis, creativity, imagination …
Always, the mistake is to separate the cultural from the technological, and that is why there is no sense of social telos in Brabazon’s book. Again, no-one’s to blame, it’s just our way of trying to understand stuff. As Nicola Yelland in Shift to the Future: Rethinking learning with new technologies in education reminds us, technology is process as well as tool. Either may be privileged, depending on the historical moment, but since Digital Hemlock was first published the Web has gone social. It is now primarily a cultural artefact, not a technological one, and re-conceptualising it as such will move our thinking and our attitudes forward, opening up exhilarating possibilities for the expansion of our own minds, not just those of our students.
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*Honest-to-God, if we ditched these ‘Learning Management Systems’ and went for web-based apps, then supposedly ‘technophobic’ teachers would be on board like that. Those we label (and who feel they must label themselves) ‘technophobic’ just have natural reactions to crappy systems — these people aren’t technophobic at all … just practical. All we need do is show them that wikis and blogs make perfectly serviceable LMSs, that Facebook has course apps that are pretty good, and that The Class Connection and MyNoteIT are specifically designed for students to track their classes. No wonder Black$Board is suing smaller competitors — it knows it’s on the way out.
