Conclusion
An ethical stance to online communication would seem to be particularly important in
educational contexts. For this reason, I have tried to draw together ideas about ethical
communication, ethical and critical communities and education as learning from the
other in this paper. This has been done by exploring the possibility of taking Levinas’
conception of the face to face encounter into an online setting. However, as Johnson
notes, any argument that a face can be revealed in online communication is not in itself
sufficient to guarantee an ethical encounter in systems such as Facebook (2010). In spite
of this, the theory discussed in this paper does support the potential for ethical, critical
and educational encounters to occur online, with the particular example explored being
the possibilities of a Facebook group. Of course, the success of any Facebook group, as
is the case for a face-to-face lecture, seminar or tutorial, will depend on the participants
and the particular group dynamic that develops.
Although I have concentrated on discussing a number of potential benefits of using
Facebook in education, it is important to note that the institution, teachers and students
have no real control over how this system might work in the future. While the
Facebook group is seen to have great potential to support contained communication
about a unit in its present form, in its next iteration posts, even from closed groups,might be shared on people’s overarching timelines (and thus with all of their friends).
The decision to broaden access to posted information has been a feature in the past as
Facebook has developed, and this trend may well continue. After all, the platform is not
designed as a space for education, it is a business that collects and markets peoples’
information in exchange for providing them with a means to communicate and share
online. Even in its present form, not all students perceive even closed Facebook groups
as safe environments. Some still worry that “their academic performance … could be
discovered by their social friends” or that “their personal information and social lives
might be accessed by the tutor” (Wang et al, p. 436). In addition, while Facebook is
currently the most widely used and familiar SNS, it is possible that this will change.
Allying education with a particular piece of commercial software, at least in part on the
basis of its popularity, means that if it is superseded there will be considerable pressure
to move to whatever new platform comes along. This may or may not introduce new
possibilities and/or problems for teachers and students.
Many people now have Facebook accounts and use this SNS on a regular basis, but
in spite of its popularity it should not be assumed that all students use the system. In my
experience, even as recently as 2013, there are always a few students that have never
used Facebook and some of these people will not want to sign up. Occasionally there
will also be students who used Facebook in the past, have left the SNS and are strongly
opposed to rejoining. Indeed, even some regular Facebook users may not want to use
what they regard as a site for social interactions as an educational space. The implication
of this is that material shared and discussed in Facebook should be additional to the
core course content, or that it should be shared with all students on the institution’s
LMS or elsewhere, to include those students not on Facebook. This introduces a further
issue for some students, who then feel under pressure to check in Facebook, the LMS
and any other site being used to support information sharing and discussion, resulting in
the complaint that there are too many demands on their attention.
In spite of these provisos, thinking about online education and communities in
Facebook groups from a Levinasian perspective emphasises the importance of both
teachers and students taking responsibility for each other and for learning. At its heart,
the face to face is about paying respectful attention to others, and it therefore supports
the idea of learning from the other, as opposed to either learning about the other or
simply instructing the other. Levinas stresses the need to embrace ethical
communication as non-reciprocal, (i.e. one makes the decision to communicate without
the expectation of a response, an idea that is particularly suited to considerations of
online communication where responses can be elusive). In addition, his description of
the face to face encounter acknowledges the existence of an asymmetry between
interlocutors, and can be extended to allow this asymmetry to be fluid and changing
depending on the specific context. A conception of communication and relation drawn
from Levinas provides a way of explaining what is happening when online interactions
work so that a partial connection is made between people, or an unexpected post
highlights a new piece of valuable information or previously unconsidered perspective.
Of key importance, supporting this connection and learning, is the idea that teachers
and learners not only share information, but also share aspects of their own personal
perspectives on the material. They are thus able to reveal Levinasian faces, with SNSs
such as Facebook tending to emphasise the personal by encouraging less formal posts
more strongly than is commonly seen in interactions through LMSs such as Blackboard.
In addition, embracing the idea that the asymmetry in the relation between teachers and
learners can oscillate depending on the direction an online discussion takes, offers the
potential for anyone in the group to learn from anyone else, whether students from
other students, students from teachers or teachers from students.