LEVINAS AND THE 'INTER-FACE': THE ETHICAL CHALLENGE OF ONLINE EDUCATION

摘要

Computers have introduced into our common experience "ideas about the instability of meanings and the lack of universal and knowable truths." Online education, in particular, serves as a site for alternative enactments of the self, that is, the embodiment of multiple identities in learners. These multiple identities are rather complex: they are enactments of the self implicated in the politics, economics, and ethics of everyday life. The capacity of the Web to produce learning environments that are supportive of hybrid identities, complex discourses, and multiple relations among learners raises questions about the ethical response of online educators: How are identity and communication constituted in online education? What are the features of an ethical pedagogy in online education — that is, a pedagogy that considers the ethical implications of online communication? These questions focus on the analysis of online pedagogies as ethical processes for creating the Other. Such questions do not provide us with any fixed ethical framework for analyzing the complexities of online education; however, they do help us think in alternative ways about the ethical dimensions of online education itself. In other words, online education becomes a site for ethical investigation concerning "the nature, meaning, and moral worth of the educational enterprise itself." In addition, this project opens up possibilities for investigating the ethics of how difference matters in online relations.