Issues of embodiment and risk in online learning

Counter positioning virtual learning environments with traditional face to face learning has given rise to comparisons in which cyberspace education is represented as inauthentic, as a relatively impoverished experience. Recent commentaries (for example Dreyfus, 2001) suggest that an explanatory factor in this perceived lack of intensity is the absence of risk, as experienced by both students and teachers. In this analysis, risk carries an affective intensity integral to embodiment, physical presence and the visibility of teacher and students. This intensity is seen as crucial to learner commitment, and other social and ethical engagement. The diminished possibility of such encounters online renders what one does in cyberspace as having no ‘real’ consequences. This paper critically examines such claims and the extent to which online environments are seen to minimise risk through mechanisms of control. The paper problematises such notions and examines the possibility that learning in cyberspace, rather than being comparatively risk free, contains risks and disquietudes that are qualitatively different. Similarly it cautions against what is termed here the ‘incorporeal fallacy’ of assuming that cyberlearning is, indeed, disembodied. Rather it argues the need to reconsider how notions of risk, the subjectivity of the learner and ideas of embodiment might all be differently constituted online.