Section Four

Quality and Equality of Learning

Overview

This section explores how technology affects the nature of the teaching and learning process in terms of two closely linked concepts, quality and equality of learning.

Quality is considered in reference to perspectives that support more holistic approaches to learning, including those developed by feminist educators, and by practitioners in adult and in distance education.

Considering the issue of equality of learning entails looking at whether particular strategies or technologies tend to favor some types of learners more than others, and whether disparities result from intrinsic characteristics of a technology, or simply from choices about specific approaches and applications. These are some of the questions addressed in this section:

• To what extent are new learning technologies appropriate for different approaches to learning and different types of learning?
  
  
• To what extent are new learning technologies appropriate for different kinds of learners?
  
  
• Are there approaches to learning that are precluded by using new learning technologies?
  
  
• Are there approaches to learning that are supported much better by new learning technologies than by previously used strategies?
  
  
• To what extent do new learning technologies accommodate "women-friendly" approaches to learning?

Background: Perspectives on learning

Within the broad range of theories about learning, two opposing perspectives are most relevant to this discussion. Franklin describes this divergence as the difference between production models and growth models. Production models are based on discrete, controllable processes and outcomes, whereas growth models describe more spontaneous processes emerging from the dynamics of human interaction. She notes,

"If ever there was a growth process, if ever there was a holistic process, a process than cannot be divided into rigid predetermined steps, it is education."⁴²

There are many cases in which the use of educational technologies is based on a production model of learning.⁴³ However, the perspectives used to consider quality and equality of learning in this paper are based on growth models of learning.

These include feminist perspectives and viewpoints emerging from adult and distance education. These perspectives that support holistic approaches to learning are particularly relevant when we want to consider the extent to which new learning technologies support a full range of approaches to teaching and learning, and accommodate different types of learning and learners and differences based on context and community.

Feminist perspectives

There is a long tradition of philosophical and psychological speculation about differences between men and women's ways of perceiving and understanding the world: recent concepts are concerned more with gender-the socially framed context which shapes the different life experience of women and men-than with sex specific differences that relate to differences in physiology. The issue of what has been termed "women's ways of knowing" has been at the core of an educational discussion for the past 15 years, since the 1982 publication of Carol Gilligan's work, In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. In Gilligan's terms, gender-related ways of approaching the world result from:

Different ways of viewing the world affect how people learn. It has been suggested that the more socially-oriented framework of women's lives fosters a more cooperative approach to learning, which values discussion, shared experience, and the opportunity to relate new learning to one's own life and experience.

Adult and distance education perspectives

It is not only feminist approaches that value more socially-oriented learning principles. Those who work in and write about the field of adult and distance education point out the importance of egalitarian approaches to learning that respect the learners' experience and allow for integration of learning and life experience, through discussion, cooperative learning strategies and an equal emphasis on the learning process as on learning outcomes. For example, MacKeracher refers to the intrinsic drives to human action as competence, the skills, knowledge and attitudes to operate independently, and connectedness, the sense of belonging in rewarding relationships.⁴⁵ Aboriginal educators assert the value of approaches that provide for continuity between learning and life, and that support social learning strategies based on community values.