This special issue of Interactive Learning Environments devoted to TEL – the crisis and the response, commenced in the autumn of 2013, and is the culmination of a process and a group that had their beginnings in March 2012 with a workshop entitled Education for the Crisis (http://educationforthecrisis.wikispaces.com/People) − held at Leicester De Montfort University in England. The Alpine Rendez-Vous (ARV) (https://metah.imag.fr/alpine-rendez-vous/workshops/?lang=fr) is an established and unusual scientific event focused on Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). The ARV series of events is promoted by TELEARC and EATEL associations. It took up the legacy of the FP6 Networks of Excellence, Kaleidoscope and Prolearn, and the FP7 Network of Excellence STELLAR. Both of these had sustained TEEARC and EATEL in past years. The goal of the ARV is to bring together researchers from different scientific communities doing research on TEL, in a largely informal setting, away from workplace routines. Although originating in Europe, the ARV is open to researchers and proposals from around the world.
ARV is always structured as a set of independent parallel workshops located at the same time in the same place. Workshops may last two to three days each, with half of them taking place in the first part of the week and the other half in the second part − possibly with a “common day” in the middle. The ARV of 2013 took place from January 28th to February 1st, in Villard-de-Lans, a village in the middle of Vercors. The event was organised in a way that promoted informal encounters between participants from the different workshops.
An informal group concerned about the relationships between TEL research and “crisis,” change, discontinuity and dislocation, in the wider world, had a workshop proposal accepted and called for individual proposals, positions and participation. Our Crisis workshop was potentially at odds with the ethos of the ARV umbrella: rather than assuming that problems needed solving, our emerging position was that problem-solving was itself the problem.
The process involved the ARV workshop itself in late January 2013, a plenary debate at ALT-C in Nottingham in September 2013, and continuous engagement with the group's blog, the ARV Crisis Forum (https://arv13crisisforum.wordpress.com). Earlier discussions (e.g. purpose/ed: http://purposed.org.uk/ and e4c, education-for-crisis: http://educationforthecrisis.wikispaces.com/) had outlined the emergent crisis in broad terms and identified different perspectives and components. Links, conceptual and actual, were made to the transition movement, the open movement and the occupy movement, as parts of wider responses to differing perceptions and perspectives of an underlying malaise.
Rationale and background
The TEL research community has undoubtedly been successful over the last 15 or 20 years in extending, enriching and even challenging the practices and theories of education within its professions and within its institutions. Through them it has engaged in turn with the institutions and professions of industry and government. These have been largely inward-looking discourses best suited to a world characterised by stability, progress and growth. These are all now problematic and uncertain, and call for new discourses within the TEL research community and across its borders. The world is now increasingly characterised by challenges, disturbances and discontinuities that threaten these dominant notions of stability, progress and growth. These represent the grand challenges to the TEL research community, challenges to the community to stay relevant, responsive, rigorous and useful.
Earlier discussions (e.g. purpos/ed, http://purposed.org.uk/ and e4c, education-for-crisis, http://educationforthecrisis.wikispaces.com/) had outlined the emergent crisis in broad terms and identified different perspectives and components, including:
Economic and resource crises, including long-term radical increases in economic inequality within nations; youth unemployment across Europe, the polarisation of employment and the decline in growth; sovereign debt defaults and banking failures; mineral and energy constraints;
Environmental and demographic crises, in particular, the implications of declining land viability for migration patterns; refugee rights and military occupations; nation-state population growth and its implications for agriculture, infrastructure and transport;
The crisis of accountability, expressed in the failure of traditional representative democratic systems, especially in the context of global markets, the growth of computerised share-dealing; the emergence of new private sector actors in public services; the growth of new mass participatory movements and the rise of unelected extremist minorities both challenging the legitimacy of the nation-state and its institutions;
Socio-technical disruptions and instability, exaggerated by a reliance on non-human intelligence and large-scale systems of systems in finance, logistics and healthcare, and by the development of a data-rich culture; the increasing concentration and centralisation of Internet discourse in the walled gardens of social networks; the proliferation and complexity of digital divides; the dependency of our educational institutions on computer systems for research, teaching, study and knowledge transfer;
The dehumanisation crisis, expressed in the production of fear between people, the replacement of human flourishing with consumption, the replacement of the idea of the person with the idea of the system, the replacement of human contact with mediated exchange, the commodification of the person, education and the arts.
And specifically, in relation to TEL:
TEL and the industrialisation of education; marginal communities and the globalisation and corporatisation of learning; futures thinking as a way to explore TEL in relation to resilience; the political economy of technology in higher education and technological responses to the crisis of capitalism; the role of openness as a driver for innovation, equity and access; digital literacies and their capacity to shift TEL beyond skills and employability in an increasingly turbulent future; connectedness and mobility as seemingly the defining characteristics of our societies; the role and responsibility of research and of higher education as these crises unfold, the complicity or ambiguity of TEL in their development; is the current TEL ecosystem and environment sustainable, is it sufficiently responsive and resilient, how extent does TEL research question, support, stimulate, challenge and provoke its host higher education sector?
TEL is at the intersection of technology and learning and encapsulates many of the ideals, problems and potential of both. Education and technology permeate all of the perspectives outlined above, some more than others. It is possible, however, that they could ameliorate some of their consequences or amplify and exaggerate others. TEL has been a project and a community nurtured within the institutions and organisations of formal education in the recent decades of relative stability and prosperity in the developed nations of Asia-Pacific, North America and Western Europe. Some of the critical challenges directly relate to the perceived missions of the TEL project and its community. Contemporary formal education in schools, colleges and universities is increasingly reliant on TEL. The TEL community is, however, currently poorly equipped either to resist the progress of these crises today or to enable individuals and communities to flourish despite their consequences. This then is the context for the following contributions.
Related Research Data
