Opponent: Professor

This research is about a small village school participating in an inter-institutional electronic network of schools using information and communication technologies in the context of the Kilpisjärvi project 1994 to 1997. The project concerned the establishment of the lower secondary school in the Kilpisjärvi village. The school was linked with a network which also included the Teacher Training school, both the primary school and the lower secondary school, and the Ruskela primary school. The perspective in this ethnographic research is that of the people in Kilpisjärvi. The background is based on the media educational view according to which people are active actants both in the environments which information and communication technologies create and in the nexus of local and non-local items. Education is, partly, regarded as a deterritorialised phenomenon that has transcended terrafirma. The concept of ‘eduscape’ is used in this context. The virtual classroom concept is elaborated in the terms of virtuality. Virtuality, in turn, is understood as a phenomenon which includes the aspect of ‘as-if-real’ and that of possible worlds. The classroom of the Kilpisjärvi project in which two physically separate groups of pupils and a teacher are linked together, is investigated as a virtual classroom. The investigation of the inter-institutional network of schools is based on the general definitions of network, and the notion of Post-Fordism is discussed in this occasion. The ethnographic approach is elaborated to better suit translocal phenomena. The educational activities which occurred in the inter-institutional network are called distance education in this research. Distance education impacted the relationship between the Kilpisjärvi school and the community, mainly the parents. Distance education fundamentally helped the school to fulfil the two the needs of the community: to establish the lower secondary school and to connect the pupils with other young people of their age who live in a different kind of environment. The school network provided the parents with an opportunity to compare the educational activities of the local school with those of another school. Distance education also guaranteed the quality of education. Further, according to the Kilpisjärvi people, the participation in the school network prepared pupils to the challenges of the information society. Distance education was characterised by teachers’ competency. It was problematic to take into account the local Kilpisjärvi context in the distance education but, on the other hand, it was not even expected by the Kilpisjärvi pupils and the parents. The local education had the total responsibility for education. Although distance education was characterised by competency, local education was not underestimated in this context, but the local teachers had to develop themselves towards the competency level of distance education. Local education was a kind of infrastructure on which distance education was based. Intensive networking outside transformed the Kilpisjärvi school towards horizontal integration and vertical fragmentation. The virtual classroom was mainly based on mutual educational interests which both the Kilpisjärvi and Helsinki pupils shared, namely competent teaching. Virtual classroom was treated as a learning community, a communication system and a place. Teaching and (distance) teacher were uniting elements in establishment of a common virtual classroom. The virtual classroom dealt with the translocal view of ethnographic research. The character of school transformed towards a symbiosis of the physical and the virtual. The cyborg metaphor is also mentioned in this context.