The techneducator effect: Colliding technology and education in the conceptualization of virtual learning environment

The techneducator stands at the nexus, Janus-like, between the realms of education and technology. These two worlds meet head-on through the collisions experienced and instigated by the author of this dissertation in the conceptualization and creation of polysynchronous virtual learning environments. The dissertation itself explores multiple strands of inquiry into the author's emergence as a techneducator over two decades of working in the worlds of technology and education. The intention of this inquiry is to develop a narrative picture of the struggle to relocalize developments in technology more firmly within the purview of the educator, as opposed to the present situation where developments in educational technology are primarily controlled by programmers, technicians, administrators and corporations.;Commencing with the realization that the understanding of how technology and education should interrelated, in order to redress the imbalance that positions educators in the role of being primarily passive participants in the imposition of technology on education, the author embraced the emergent nature of inquiry and the focus of the dissertation shifted from a consideration of groups of educators learning in the virtual learning environment of MOOkti that he had created, towards a narrative inquiry of his own practice, particularly as a creator of learning environments. The resulting text, in which theory is embedded in metaphor through out the narrative, developed into the articulation of the techneducator effect. This effect in turn became the foundation for the conceptualization of educational technology manifest in COLLIDE, the Collaborative Object-based Lifetime Learning Interaction Design Engine, described in Chapter Five. COLLIDE is presented as a narrative description of a software environment that embodies the key elements of the techneducator distilled from the narrative inquiry of the previous chapter. The dissertation concludes with a meta-inquiry into the construction of the entire dissertation project in order to contextualize the inquiry into the creation of learning settings within theories of critical narrative, as a way to bring closure and to allow for meditation on locations for future inquiry.