Digital Panopticon
By the end of 2008 every school in England will have its own learning platform or virtual learning environment (VLE).
The application of this technology has the potential to change radically what we do in the classroom.
Research and practice in further and higher education along with the DCSF’s own publications suggests that teachers can expect flexible, anywhere-anytime, student centred, personalised, experiential, democratic learning to be just some of the features of teaching with this technology.
This may be difficult to achieve.
Existing structures, the ‘nine-to-five’ school day, the sixty-minute face-to-face lesson, inflexible staff working practices and a lack of understanding and training will result in at best the technology being used as a repository for learning resources, simply replicating online what we already do in the physical classroom.
At worst platforms may be used to extend and enhance a culture of monitoring and control.
Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon
