have embraced social networking services and other online tools in an attempt to
compete for the eyeballs of students in an attention economy. While digital tools and
connectivity have the potential to facilitate new learning spaces and modes of
engagement, McRae argues that the erosion of boundaries between formal and informal
learning may undermine the specificities and critical perspectives needed to facilitate and
foster deep critical thinking. McRae argues that when students are positioned as
consumers rather than learners, they tend to respond accordingly and demand an
educational experience based on immediacy and the direct provision of resources and
attention, when often a slower and more systematic approach to learning may be
required to change the way thinking happens, not just the absorption of, or simply
access to, information.
In the final article, ‘Separating Work and Play: Privacy, Anonymity and the Politics of
Interactive Pedagogy in Deploying Facebook in Learning and Teaching’, Rob Cover
also responds to the way Facebook use in educational settings may collapse particular
boundaries. Cover details the use of Facebook in a first-year unit in which students
voiced concerns about the way their educational activities on the social network were
visible to their other friends and family on the platform. Students’ desire for their online
work to be private was frequently framed in opposition to publicness, and yet Cover
argues that this context collapse highlights the very instability of the public/private
distinction. Following Henry Giroux, he argues further that Facebook as part of mass
culture can and should be deployed precisely as a destabilising space, where not just the
notion of private, but also the notions of author, audience and text are all potentially
blurred. Cover argues that when framed appropriately, Facebook as a learning tool and
space has the potential to make visible the way a range of concepts are destabilised, and
that the co-creative identities and interactions fashioned via Facebook can lead to an
extremely important mode of self-reflexive critical thinking.
Acknowledgements
The editors of this special issue wish to thank the all the authors who have contributed,
the editors of Digital Culture & Education, Christopher Walsh and Thomas Apperley, for
their encouragement and patience in the development of this issue, and the anonymous
peer reviewers whose efforts ensured the scholarly rigour of this issue.