Higher education as a visual practice: seeing through the virtual learning environment

Abstract

As certain areas of practice in higher education shift online, the work of learners and teachers increasingly takes place within the domain of the image. The ‘digital turn’ we are experiencing, both in higher education and in the wider culture, accompanies an ‘iconic turn’ in which the logic of the image as it emerges on our screens has a growing influence over our working, thinking and learning practices. Visuality gains a new urgency as we move further into the digital age. This paper considers and critiques the form of visuality which increasingly mediates between pedagogy in higher education and digital space – the interface of the virtual learning environment or VLE. If the spatial organisation and visuality of the screen both represents and creates a value system and an ontology, what social and pedagogical practices does the VLE interface reflect, inform and inscribe? What meanings does it produce? What version of pedagogy does it ‘make visible’, and what alternatives does it blind us to?

Keywords:

• visuality
• VLE
• e-learning
• image
• interface
• semiotics

Notes

1. I use here Peirce's classification where (i) indexical represents a mode of signification in which the signifier is directly connected with the signified in some observable or inferable way without directly resembling it; (ii) the iconic mode is one in which signifier and signified directly resemble one another – a portrait, for example, and (iii) the symbolic mode is one in which the connection between signifier and signified is purely conventional, as is the case with language. The distinction is not absolute or mutually exclusive – a sign may represent a combination of all three modes dependent on its context of use (Peirce, C.S. 1935. Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.). I use the more accessible Saussurean terminology of ‘signifier’ (briefly, the form of a sign – a word or image) and ‘signified’ (the ‘thing’ or concept referred to) rather than Peirce's ‘representamen’ or ‘sign’ and ‘object’ (Sausurre, F.d. 1974. Course in general linguistics. London: Fontana.).

2. The software version referred to is the widely used WebCT Campus Edition 4.1. While the latest manifestations of WebCT/Blackboard, clustered under the term ‘Blackboard Learning System’, share many of the same driving assumptions and visual modes, they will require detailed consideration in their own right.