Higher education as a visual practice: seeing through the virtual learning environment

As the practices of higher education shift online, the work of learners, teachers and scholars increasingly takes place within the domain of the image. The ‘digital turn’ we are experiencing, both in higher education and in the wider culture, accompanies an ‘iconic turn’ in which the logic of the image as it emerges on our screens has a growing influence over our modes of meaning-making (Kress 2003; Jewitt 2005) – ‘the knowledge society’, as one group proclaims, ‘has become a society of images’ (Eikones 2005).