Stories of Engagement with E-Learning: Revisiting the Taxonomy of Learning

Abstract

I argue that although university lecturers delve into the“shallow waters” of e-learning, they do not do so in sufficient depth and resign themselves to the perpetuation of cognitivist, behaviorist, and objectivist forms of knowledge without discovering more about the medium that could possibly liberate their restricted epistemologies. In this article, I explore possible reasons for varyingengagement with e-learning, assuming that these reasons are located within the dimensions of the unit of analysis ofthe study; namely, lecturers’ changing theories of knowledge and teaching in first encounters with e-learning. Using Lee Shulman’s table of learning (Shulman, 2002) as a heuristic, I use excerpts from personal narratives to highlight the epistemological and pedagogical transformation of nine lecturers as they engage witheducational technologies in their work.