Volume 7 - issue 1 - 2011

Editorial: Knowing about communication and media

frontimage Yngve Nordkvelle, editor

There is a tradition in media history from Plato idealising the communication situation that is person to person. Although several authors have shown that Socrates used many strategies for his communication to his audience, and quite a few of them were far less sincerely other-centred than his followers like to portray. In fact Socrates was using all the tricks of the communication trade: persuading, threatening, ridiculing and joking in addition to the sanctimonious dialogue. However, in the dialogues, we believe we find the true Socrates, or Plato, expressing the potential of self-liberation and self-expansion in the education of the person, in plain talking person to person. Jesus was a practitioner of communicative skills, addressing small groups, as well as larger groups and gatherings. Monty Python showed how difficult it must have been to convey the message to a really large group of followers without using a PA-system, and how creatively listeners compose new meanings from the bits and pieces they do actually hear. Nevertheless, speaking one to many was a necessity for the mass-communication ambitions of the Christians, who boldly went out to baptize the entire world.

Visual Competence, Media Literacy and "New Literacies" – Conceptual Considerations in a Plural Discursive Landscape

Professor Theo Hug opens this issue with a deep analysis of what knowing about educational media is all about. From his base at the University of Innsbruck he provides us with a profound insight in the trends and fads that we are surrounded with, and suggest new angels and ways of seeing the problems we encounter of “the visual” in teaching and learning.

The nature and limits of interactive communication: A philosophical analysis

Professor Halvor Nordby offers a deep exploration of the communication phenomenon related to the use of Internet for teaching and communication. He asks what the essential nature of this communication is and how it differs from ordinary face-to-face communication in a most fundamental sense. He provides us with a conceptual analysis as a philosophical method to explore the intrinsic nature of the concept interactive communication. His aim of this method is to develop a concept definition that matches shared linguistic beliefs about informative examples from Internet based communication and information exchange that is central in e-learning.

Title Lecturers' Conception of Learning and Use of Methods in Blended Learning Courses at Three Swedish Universities

PhD Ulf Olson, who works at the University of Stockholm offers us insights into the problems of how lecturers from three different universities interpret and apply certain methods in their blended learning/web-based courses. He compares their teaching methods to the lecturers' conceptions of learning. He used questionnaires for the survey and compares responses from lecturers in 10 subjects to each other. Olson’s main aims was to compare chosen teaching forms to conceptions of learning, and to compare subject areas with each other according to the lecturers' conceptions of learning. Not surprisingly, he did find important inconsistencies between the lecturers' ideas about learning and the teaching methods they used.

Alternative Online Evaluation in a Blended Learning Environment

Associate professor Arvid Staupe from the Norwegian University of Technology and Science, presents a paper reporting from an experiment trying out new forms of evaluation at his own institution. The article describe how he went about to solve the particular problems of students’ learning in his classes by offering alternative ways of evaluating the students’ work. The article provides evidence of the success of alternative evaluation methods, as well as documenting how conventional learning styles at the university may slow down the pace of change in this important domain.