David Mathew

From fatigue to anxiety? Implications for educational design in a Web 2.0 world

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to recognise that as educators moving into, or already in, a Web 2.0 world, we are likely to experience anxiety, and to explore the implications for educational design in a Web 2.0 world.Design/methodology/approach – The objectives are achieved as the result of recent successes with the commissioners for two online courses at the University. Both of these commissioners were anxious education developers, but have come around to a way of thinking that includes the potential of web‐based learning (at its most up‐to‐date). In this paper the author presents interviews with both of these commissioners.Findings – Not only is anxiety understandable for educators, it is an important part of the educational process (as it also is for learners); furthermore, it is a healthy response to a perception of an older (and worn out) version of the internet that is all that we have known up to now. Anxiety has implications for the design of Web 2.0 educational materials; and one argument...

The Absence of "E": The Role of the Internet in Two Distance Learning Programmes

Barely 30 years on from the advent of distance learning as we recognise it today, it has already become uncommon for a learner to embark on a programme of education that does not involve frequent access to the Internet; but if a course does not revolve around the Internet, is it in any way inferior and is the learner disadvantaged? Two of the purposes of this paper are to examine two distance learning programmes, one of which involves young offenders serving long sentences, and to explore whether or not learners with restricted Internet access are destined to lose out in an educational setting. In doing so, learner anxiety and organisational anxieties and the implications for pastoral care are also examined.

Using patient data for patients’ benefit

Full partnership will help ensure that data really does save lives

Anxiety and Fragile Learning

Learning in Higher Education is a fragile system of conscious and unconscious transactions that serve to weaken a process that is already precarious. This paper argues that learning is brittle by nature, and easily broken. Using a wide range of examples, the Fragile Learner is described as someone who is close to conceding defeat to circumstances that threaten his or her education. For the purposes of this submission, the Fragile Learner might be a student of a Higher Education Institution, but also might be an appointed educator – a lecturer or personal tutor. Fragile Learners might experience anxieties that are internal and complex – a shared attitude of wilful self-defeat, coupled with an arrangement of ready-made prejudices – which can appear to be attacks from other people. For example, anxiety creates an internal threat which presents itself as a threat from the outside. Alternatively, Fragile Learning might be a consequence of learners having suffered illness or indisposition. Alongside notions of barriers to learning and resilience, this paper explores roles and identities and the tensions that inevitably occur. Although some of the ideas that make up my picture of Fragile Learning have been researched by other contributors (notably Meyer and Land, 2006; Britzman, 2009; Hoult, 2012 & 2013), this paper views the complexities through different sets of psychoanalytic lenses. This paper is specific to adult learners (18+), and references to school children or students in institutions of Further Education are beyond its reach.

Conflict in Online Learning

This chapter argues that a necessary component of online learning design is the deliberate creation of conflict. It argues that conflict is not a by-product of creative design, it is an important ingredient in creative design; as such it should be planned for, and the emphasis on its creation should not be downplayed. Drawing on the work on groups by Bion (Experiences in groups, 1961) and Obholzer (The unconscious at work, 1994), the paper argues that the creative urges of learners are engaged via the application of group conflict; via an understanding of the importance of conflict and brief studies of both group formation and of conflict in groups, this reflective and theoretical paper explores learner anxiety, especially through a psychoanalytic lens.

Cyber Tools and Virtual Weapons

This paper addresses the subjects of social media-augmented political action, the role of social media in the coordination of aggressive group behaviour and the tactics employed to counter aggression. Using examples ranging from an historical secret society to an American crime show, the paper argues that the functions frequently exploited by social media are not new, even if the tools used to execute the exploitation are. The paper employs applications of psychoanalysis—most notably Freud’s theories of group psychology and the analysis of the ego and the Lacanian Other—to discuss such topics as the hive mind, revolutions and televised violence.

Ocular injuries in people with multiple trauma.

About 8% of all major trauma patients have eye injuries, which can have serious implications for the patients and their families. This article outlines a practical approach to the recognition, assessment and management in emergency departments of common ocular traumatic injuries. It also provides an overview of the applied anatomy, and discusses common complications.

E-Learning, Time and Unconscious Thinking:

This article views the temporal dimensions of e-learning through a psychoanalytic lens, and asks the reader to consider links between online learning and psychoanalysis. It argues that time and its associated philosophical puzzles impinge on both psychoanalytic theory and on e-learning at two specific points. The first is in the distinction between unconscious mental activity and conscious thinking. In psychoanalysis we would talk of the distinction between primary and secondary processes, and here the article notes the learners disregarding of the category of time in the former, and the learners cognizance of it in the latter, exploring some of the characteristics of both of these processes. The learners sense of time is a result of experiencing delay between desire and satisfaction. Here, the wish-fulfilling propensities of the primary processes deny time, whereas the adaptive propensities of the secondary processes lead to its discovery. The second specific point of interest is a viewing of Freuds theory of memory from a contemporary pedagogic standpoint. Freuds theory of memory assumes that all past experiences are represented in the present and are capable of manifesting an effect on the present. The article asks the reader to consider how this might challenge the learner.

The very thought of education: Psychoanalysis and the impossible professions

‘It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those “impossible” professions’, Sigmund Freud writes in Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937), ‘in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government’. Those of us who know our Freud will be aware of several matters that thwart a knee-jerk decoding of such a desultory declaration. True, Freud’s gobbet might lead to the perception of education (and psychoanalysis) being doomed to a fate of programmatic self-destruction; but it is also true that Freud was confrontationally provocative and frequently witty (for which he is rarely given credit). Furthermore, these two (decontextualized) sentences, published in the winter of his years (he died in 1939), might well have inspired at least two major books, both of them adroit, expertly conceived and beautifully executed. The first of these is Janet Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1983, 1997). And now we have Britzman’s The Very Thought of Education, in which the author applies psychoanalytic theory to the mysteries of education. The book is taut, dense, short and extremely sharp, with the author possessing an enviable talent for a variety of writing styles: from the graspable précis (‘Freud was the first lecturer on the problem of taking in and spitting out psychoanalysis. He already knew that psychology makes us nervous’); to the slyly poetic (on the subject of the Ishiguro novel, Never Let Me Go, she writes that ‘Retroactive time collapses from memory’s weight’); to any number of formulations, commonsense and gloomy in tone, that would seem to agree with Freud’s original statement, for example: ‘the idea that teaching transfers the teacher’s emotional world (including what is unconscious about it) as much as it does the material may be hard to take sitting down, for it means that, in teaching, each and every aspect of the self, including its most unwanted and unknown parts, is called upon. The idea that the teacher communicates something she knows nothing about invites our passion for ignorance’. Sometimes, the author coagulates all of these three styles simultaneously. She claims that her goal is to ‘stretch Freud’s formulation of the impossible professions to the theatre of subjectivity... We will see again that education, as much as it is a form of thought and a structure of knowledge procedures, competes with that which is not education at all, namely, narcissism and emotional storms’. She also queries why ‘the thought of education dissolves into anxieties of really bad pedagogy and therefore gives away our capacity to think the collapse of our pedagogical themes’. Innovations in Education and Teaching International Vol. 49, No. 4, November 2012, 449–450

Arguing Against the Real

At the heart of this superbly chewy paper (Liao, Sandberg, & Roache, 2012) is an extrapolative suggestion of the overlaps between ethics, criminality, guilt and goodwill. The fact that such uneasy bedfellows have been brought together in a most illuminating (and terrifying) manner says much about the environmental and emotional scaffolds on which we work: the paper expresses an idea that has been part of our collective unconscious for some time, perhaps, and one that has howled out for articulation. For this the authors are praised. Following the gloomy implication that geoengineering is likely to fail, we are asked to consider the undertaking of changes in behaviours that ‘most of us could easily physically perform’. This is sly. A physical performance of any one of the actions suggested – such as eating ‘something that makes us feel nauseous’ in order to ‘trigger long-lasting food aversion’ – is much more, of course, than an application of physicality. A physical performance induces (and requires) an accompanying emotional driver, anyway: in other words, what the authors propose is considerably easier said than done! What about actions (to borrow their phrase) that most of us could easily emotionally perform? If we accept the arguable contention that this would be where our troubles really began, we are obliged to take on the weight of morals that we would more comfortably and happily shed. For example, we are invited to endorse the ethical shortcuts inherent in the breeding of a new generation of physically shorter people: this would be a good thing, would it not? Certainly it would in the strictly logical – we might even say rigidified – world that this paper delineates: a world in which the lowering of birth rates is a sane measure (for the long run) and scarcely so much as objectionable . . .Are we feeling guilty yet? A more important question might be: do we really want any of this to happen? This causes us to balance a sense of righteousness against something more altruistic and lasting. We can have a long-term better future . . . but only if we make some sacrifices now. And yet the making of sacrifices now will involve a huge amount of emotional and financial investment. We will have to convince ourselves – or allow ourselves to be convinced – that a future that we never get to see or experience will