Having studied fully-online for half a decade, I have gotten used to certain modes of interaction that differ from the regular campus student. Perhaps the most striking difference is the lack of physical contact with an intellectual community that I, ironically, establish contact with on a daily basis. With this comes a stark difference in the way that I interact with knowledge, such as how I am stripped of the opportunity to respond in-the-moment when listening to an asynchronous recording, compared to the opportunity for reciprocity if I was physically present at a lecture.
While this might appear to be a simple change of setting, it reflects an appropriation of content from one medium to another constituting a process of remediation that holds important consequences to the recipient. According to Bolter and Grusin (2000), there is a “double logic” at play involving what they refer to as immediacy and hypermediacy. The former refers to the rendering of a medium as invisible by removing signs of mediation, while the latter refers to the exact opposite, the multiplicity of representations that heighten our awareness of media. Underlying these concepts is an appeal to the authenticity of experience — the insistence that the experience of the medium is, in fact, an experience of the real. Accordingly, it is through this promise of newer and more authentic experiences that cause immediacy to lead to hypermediacy; a double logic.
Take, for example, virtual whiteboards in learning management systems that allow for real-time teacher-student interactions. Bolter and Grusin (2000) argue that the way to achieve an authentic sense of the real is through transparent immediacy in which the interface erases itself so that the experience of the remediated content resembles the original content as much as possible. In this sense, virtual whiteboards succeed at creating a sense of synchronous activity resembling a live lecture, however, hypermediacy comes into play with virtual whiteboards that have an additional chat window function: in aiming to recreate the experience of classroom reciprocity, the presence of the chat window acutely highlights the discontinuities between the original and the remediation.
From this example, it becomes clear how remediation is, in fact, a defining characteristic of online learning, even more, it is an active process of meaning-making imbued with its own messages (McLuhan, 1964; Botler & Grusin, 2000). In any form of remediation, the call to authenticity of experience — and I would argue, the experience of learning in particular — remains vital to the online classroom. Particularly, in exploiting remediated forms of content, students should not be experiencing technology and media for learning, but rather, should be experiencing learning through the immediacy of such technologies and media.
References
Bolter, J.D.& Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Boston, M.A.: MIT Press.