The society of information and communication in education: Speeches configuring the teacher for virtual education: Subjective and subjectivity

Introducción

International and national multilateral agents and government institutions promote technology in virtual education, in different modalities (Face, Distance, Virtual) in Latin America and Colombia, through discourses of inevitability and legitimators in which they argue that “the great promise of new technologies lies in the possibility they offer us of creating conditions and environments for us to learn without being taught and without the space-time barriers that surround formal education” (Henao, 2002, p.10). Similarly, in recent years, policies have addressed the issue of training educators for the virtualization of education in Colombia, for example, in the document on El Sistema Colombiano de Formación de Educadores y Lineamientos de Política del Ministerio de Educación Nacional (MEN) requires for the training of graduates (initial training) “the development of skills and abilities in information and communication technologies, for the design, development and evaluation of educational tools” (MEN, 2013, p. 73); Similarly, in-service training emphasizes ICT training for appropriation “as tools for the development of thinking, learning and knowledge management” (MEN, 2013, p. 93). From the above, the reflection of this paper analyzes the strategy of power directed towards the configuration of educators for the emergence of technology in modalities such as virtualization in education in Colombia, which identifies the knowledge and practices that have allowed to constitute as much, subjects for the technologizing of the education in modalities as the virtualization, nevertheless, subjects of processes of resistance to those knowledges and technologizing practices.

The forces at play in history obey neither a destination nor a mechanic, but effectively at random of the struggle. They do not manifest themselves as the successive forms of a primordial intention. [...] ‘Effective’ history is distinguished from that of historians [of ideas] in the fact that it is not based on any constancy. [...] Everything that one relies on to turn to history and grasp it in its entirety, everything that allows one to describe it as a patient continuous movement, is all that is systematically broken down. (1979, pp. 46-49)

The archeological-genealogical method allows us to criticize ourselves, since we call into question the truths that have constituted us as individuals, identifying these strategies of power allow us to “establish the historical conditions that made it possible for us to be prisoners of our own history” (Martínez, 2009, p.136).

The theoretical basis of the research refers mainly to Foucault's approaches to knowledge, power and subjectivation, but also relies on the complementary reflections of thinkers such as Deleuze, Lazzarato, Lyotard, Negri, Touraine and Virilio. This theoretical body has been the “toolbox” to conceptualize the virtual education system in Colombia and the possible resistances of the educator to the strategy of the Information Society and Knowledge. However, we have not intended to make a faithful investigation of Foucault's thought in the sense of spreading a doctrine, but only:

“to use it, as he himself taught us, under the pressure of specific problems, to know if it is possible to construct a new policy for real. Since the only mark of recognition that can be witnessed to a thought ... is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it squeak, to shout, is that we decide to take the inherited to make its own” (Guyot, Marincevic and Becerra, 1996, p. 16).

The Educator Formed for Virtual Education: Archaeological Analysis

Another innovation of the classical age that historians of science they left in the shade. History of the experiences blind from birth, werewolves or about hypnosis. But who will do the more general, more imprecise, and more decisive history of the “Exam”, its rituals, its methods, its characters and its questions and answers, their systems of notation and classification? Because in this poor technique are found involved a whole domain of knowledge, a whole type of power. (Foucault,1976, pp. 189-190).

The phenomenon called virtual education appears in Colombia, a point of view led by Facundo (2002), in the 1980’s, a phenomenon that has two aspects of development: the first that has been called distance / virtual education; and the second, is known as educational computing (page 1). However, this statement is not as accurate as Facundo suggests; given that Nietzsche proposes a notion that allows us to determine when a new force appears in history: it is the emergence (Entstehung) understood as “the point of emergence, it is the principle and the singular law of an apparition” (Foucault, 1979, p. 15) under certain specific conditions. The emergence conditions of virtual education are identified in the year 1998, in which its primordial condition of existence is Internet, an infrastructure in network (Facundo, 2002, p. 9). Thus, in 1998, the Universidad Militar Nueva Granada and Universidad Católica del Norte (established as the first virtual university in Colombia) lead the offer of virtual undergraduate programs, specialization and continuing education. Virtual education is the integration of educational resources through the internet, which will promote academic programs under this condition, hence the incorporation of virtual education into educational processes is brought about by the integration of information and communication technologies (ICT)¹.

In other words, the EV displaces “the axis of teaching-learning from teacher-centered teaching to learning where the central role to play the participant himself supported in an advanced technological platform” (Yanes, 2008, p. 175). The EV proposes a pedagogical process centered on the participant with the support of technology and obeys a cognitive conception of learning. This theoretical displacement of the learning model promotes a different place and function of the educator; although the fundamental feature of the new learning design is flexibility in time and space management, the role of the educator is to “coordinate and design activities, feedback and monitor student work” (Henao, 2002, p. 43), in the times that the student chooses.

It should also be said that in the findings, governmental entities such as Unesco (2002), emphasize the training of educators to refine and renew their knowledge by educating in the use of ICT, and inform themselves about the rich variety of educational and digital materials available on the Internet, in the way that the knowledge of the professional of the documentation serves to carry out a work focused on “Finding and accessing relevant information, working with more complex computer peripherals, installing and configuring basic and specialized computer applications, and managing, processing and transmitting comprehensive and complex”(Rama, 2012, p. 24). José Silvio (2000) to modify the role of transmitter teacher a facilitator and creator of conditions for learning products; from educator to manager, to enter the information society. The educators, according to Henao:

Se transforman en guías del aprendizaje, tutores y promotores de debates virtuales, consejeros, impulsadores de las redes, en los cuales ellos también aprenden durante la interacción con todos los miembros del grupo virtual, enriqueciendo permanentemente el debate, generando y poniendo a disposición materiales para consulta y estudio, a través de las redes. (2002, p. 8)

The place of the educator in front of the knowledge will be of eternal apprentice. Learning, whatever it is, is subject to the use of technology that makes it easy. Consequently, the “new teacher who needs modern society must be an expert in learning, not simply a person with specialized training in a discipline” (Henao, 2002, p. 10). Thus, the role and place of educators are transformed by virtue of the new way of establishing the communicative encounter between the actors of the formation process. Educators should be concerned not to remain obsolescence of their old role.

Strategy to Incorporate Technology in Education Through Virtual Modality

“The genealogy is gray, meticulous and patiently documentary. Work with scrambled, blurred scrolls, several times rewritten”. Foucault (1979, p. 13)

The discourses are socio-historical constructions and obey to practices of power, that are valid, are transformed or are mimicked according to those practices. For the purposes of the investigation we ask ourselves how has virtuality been legitimated in the educational field? The relationships that weave knowledge and power between education, ICT and knowledge are a network of threads that do not stop linking, form tissues within the initial fabric and include new ones. To inquire into the conditions by which virtual education has become a strategy of knowledge and truth, in a device of power, discipline or control, confronts us with legitimating discourses, truth games organized by the Information Society and knowledge².

In our journey through the history of the present, we have documented and identified the conditions that have made naturalization, normalization, regularization and mutation of virtual education and its practices possible in Colombia.

The virtualization of education has given rise to discourses that seek to anchor it to a distant past, as if what was said about virtuality in the Middle Ages scholastic was perennial in time and could not acquire other meanings in other historical moments; as if the term “virtual” had not been signified in other social configurations, according to other strategies of power. This perspective is led by Pierre Lévy with his book What is the virtual? in which he formulates a “non-catastrophic” hypothesis of virtualization, considering that it “is part of the process of hominization... It is presented as the movement of to become another - or heterogenesis of the human” (Lévy, 1999, pp. 12-13). The reflection of the philosopher Lévy, even legitimate that the deep sufferings experienced by virtualization is because of their misunderstanding and understanding that, permanent updating and updating is necessary (1999); Does legitimizing from a remote past a perspective of virtuality as a potential act not perfectly articulate a strategy that promotes the inevitability and the need for change in education to be linked to socio-economic transformations?

The speeches normalize virtual education according to the demands of the information society and knowledge: globalization and innovation, in the words of Octavio Henao the only way parents can find a guarantee that their children receive an adequate education, to address the challenges imposed on labor and social level by globalization is the inclusion of ICT in the classroom. In the MEN Altablero newspaper, for Miryam Ochoa Dean Faculty of Education “At present, teachers and faculty in practice are undergoing an endless number of demands and expectations, most of them aimed at responding in the short term to the challenges of the globalized world and the society of the knowledge” (2005, p. 1).

The OAS in 2013, through Virtual Educa, confirm that the new educational formulation derives from globalization and the implementation of the technological - communicative paradigm, in a process of sustainable development based on innovation; In fact, the profound changes in the communications system determine the growing dynamics of globalization, and it redefines the effects of the means of teaching on the mechanisms of construction of subjectivities. For example, access to information (on the web) marks a line of separation between digital natives (skilled and naturalized) and digital immigrant laggards (excluded because they do not access globalized knowledge). In the meantime, the discourse of innovation constitutes the self-managing of knowledge, emerges in organizational conditions as something that can be ‘managed’, that is, self-managing is treated as sediments of continuous and recurring organizational practices. The role of innovation is precisely to invent the knowledge self-manager, in short, to create a field of identities that are organized continuously and are efficient and effective moderators of the knowledge circulating in ICT. Virtual education becomes the organizational interaction par excellence where the self-managing subject that reform was claiming. What is sought is to institute competences on the mind that enable the individual to be “useful to information technology and communication”. The virtual educator must be a substantive transformation, reinventing his role, acquirer of competences according to the demands of ICT, that allow him to assume a productive place in info communicational society.

The technologies of information and communication function as instruments of “educational reform”, its raison d'être, is the manufacture of docile, useful and productive minds; in the channeling of the behavior of perpetually watched and normalized individuals. Educational reform is a form of power present in the control of the role of the educator, which today is a management mechanism, as Deleuze has pointed out, in relation to the management role of reforms:

Los ministros competentes anuncian constantemente las supuestamente necesarias reformas. Reformar la escuela, reformar la industria, reformar el hospital, el ejército, la cárcel; pero todos saben que, a un plazo más o menos largo, estas instituciones están acabadas. Solamente se pretende gestionar su agonía y mantener a la gente ocupada mientras se instalan esas nuevas fuerzas que ya están llamando a nuestras puertas. Se trata de las sociedades de control, que están sustituyendo a las disciplinarias. (1990, p. 278)

The fundamental mechanisms for the achievement of virtualization of education have been assumed in educational policies, as an undeniable need to change pedagogical models, seeking to improve coverage, continuity, quality and educational equity. Virtual education as a modality fully fulfills these challenges: it facilitates access to the population, promotes the permanence and flexibility of learning; guarantees an effective learning and is available on the network for all users, without exception (Fundación Universitaria Católica del Norte, 2005). The virtualization of education is configured in a flexible interactive scenario between users: learning to learn, self-learning and / or facilitators of learning.

The absolute quality, coverage, continuity and equity of the educational apparatus are a clear signal of the installation of virtualization at different levels of Colombian training; virtual education operates as a dynamizing device of educational strategies: it guarantees access to knowledge (homogenization of the population), promotes the updating of training (linking to info communication production) and guides the practice of flexible and easy learning (regulation of the educator).

The strategy has regulated until today the problematization of the pedagogical practices of the educators, those denominated “traditional”, the speeches of the academics, promoters of the incorporation of the EV, are perhaps the most forceful in the purpose of to disqualify the practices of educators, the discourse that implies the need for change “more comprehensive, flexible and interdisciplinary, because the teaching or pedagogical practices cannot ignore the local, regional, national and global contexts [...] also towards the construction of the cognitive autonomy” (Altablero, 2004, p. 5) contrasts and problematizes in this duality the flexible / the inflexible, Integration / dispersion, cognitive autonomy / cognitive dependence, new technologies can maximize old practices centered on the one that teaches, or renew them with different degrees of change, giving increasing control to the learner (p. 4). Hence, the strategy of problematizing, as well as the proposal for change, is also “integral”, and not only limited to the practices of educators, it encompasses the curriculum, the school, higher education and even educational systems.

In Latin America, since 1974, traditional / modern dualism has been introduced to disqualify the traditional approach, that is, in the basic functioning of the classroom, in the way that teaching materials are prepared for use in the educational field, tries to compare from the own rationality of change proposed by the Educational Technology (TE). Three elements of the TE strategy that strengthen and promote expert knowledge discourses for the incorporation of ICT and EV: technological means, teaching focused on student learning, learning based on objectives for effectiveness.

Of the Learning Operators of the Infocommunication Society to the Resistance and Dissent

“Resistance is the last word”,

Albert Camus

The educator is a historical constitution and is not first and not always identical in itself; the constitution of a new Colombian educator mode refers to three irreducible dimensions of knowledge, power and the self; therefore, our interest is not the inquiry into the existence or otherwise of the virtualization of education; the interest that confronts us are the ways and the functions of the educator's thought, the relationship with himself that resists the codes and forces of the outside, that is, the outside that forms a subjectivity of the Colombian educator for a virtual education; we are interested in the modes of subjectivation that have generated resistance to the facilitator, self-proponent of knowledge and the eternal apprentice, because, “in power relations, there is necessarily a possibility of resistance, since if there were no such possibility of resistance -of flight, of deception, of strategies that invest the solution- there would be absolutely no relations of power” (Foucault, 1999, p. 405).

The ways of being and thinking of the educator as the self-facilitator of knowledge and facilitator of learning are constituted in the practice of continuous training, in which knowledge is updated and changing, since mercantilism is miniaturized, more flexible and can exercise control in a discreet and even voluntary way on the part of the apprentices. There are no teachers with bulky books who show their ominous character, but the “double educator” who learns to learn; It has equipment, from the corporate technological sector in cooperation with multilateral agencies, that can go from programs like Tablets to Educate to the cellular telephones, from the video cameras placed in the classrooms to the Virtual Classrooms Educa SXXI, to exert the control of its learning. There is a “School of the digital age” that extends throughout the length and breadth of everyday life; to the extent that the closure is abandoned, other surveillance mechanisms fraternize with the individual, hence Deleuze points out “It is not necessary science fiction to conceive a mechanism of control that indicates at every instant the position of an element in a place open, animal in a reserve, man in a company (electronic collar)... what matters is not the barrier, but the computer that indicates the position of each, licit or illicit, and operates a universal modulation” (1999, p. 4).

The educator, in modern education, intended that the student be a body willing to acquire form from his teaching and had all the faculty of modeling his students. Now, the facilitator is a kind of mold that is changing, that is in movement and learns with variable frequency; are subjectivities ready to accumulate functions (apprentice, teacher, administrator, designer). The subjectivities of the facilitator and self-manager are modular, while they hoard, abandon and incorporate functions according to the schemas of information technologies and work production. According to Mauricio Lazzarato, “If the disciplines shaped bodies by forming habits mainly in body memory, control societies modulate brains and constitute habits mainly in spiritual memory” (2007, p. 100). It also proposes control techniques, whose operation is based more on recording variable setpoints in memory, through information and communication technologies, than in carving fixed slogans in enclosed subjectivities. This would be the true sense of the step of the educator (molded): the operator of learning (modulated). The figure of the virtuous educator who facilitates learning, the eternal apprentice, accumulator of imperative functions: designer, manager, guide, tutor, in which new standardizing apparatuses are seen as the operators of ICT.

And yes, a struggle of subjectivation goes through a resistance to the modes of subjection of the virtual educator, a struggle that presents itself as a right to difference or as a right to variation, that is, to a self, which folds to resist to the outside (Deleuze, 1987). It would seem that in the process of subjectivation of the educator for virtual education plays a fundamental role the use that is given to information and communication technologies, either as a pedagogical model, didactic or a tool in the classroom: The educators have been dedicated to save the technological artifacts, without making any use of them in the classroom, says a teaching director who is part of the program Computadores para Educar.

Educators who resist the use of technology in the classroom say that the reason they do not use ICT is because they consider it “dangerous” for their students:

I am aware of what they do with the Internet and they are really dangerous, because they end up in pages with frightening contents. (CPE teacher, 2014)

Educators who are afraid of virtual education may do so because they suspect the effective and innovative method of learning, the educator who has limited the use of the network to his students in the classroom, which uses the Internet only as a reference tool ( as it was done with libraries or the guiding text, from its configuration as educator) creates a form of pedagogy in which the communication in the network is not fundamental (as it is believed) for the learning; to illustrate, a group of educators (belonging to the program of Computers to Educate) consider that nothing is learned from the Internet, on the contrary suppose that they are a risk for their students, therefore, what circulates in the network must be supervised by a In addition, there is no reason to believe that students use the Internet for training purposes, in the words of the resistance.

I suspect that there is not even a vague awareness about the vision of citizens that we intend to form from programs with TIC. (CPE teacher, 2014)

Now, against this info communicational kraken that recognizes the educator as an operator of ICTs, in which it is no longer necessary to know how to teach, but rather to be a tool to dictate class; before this game of truth, we have reflected and we suggest resisting the following postulates, like this:

The first postulate refers to a rhizomatic function of formation, a rhizome that teaches beyond the logic of information, that as educators we stop planting trees in the head and think rather that the brain is more a grass than a tree (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. 20). The training system in which the knowledge of the communicative root (TIC) is acquired is a hierarchical graph, which is only traceable to a central order, therefore, what we propose is a multiplicity of conditions of possibility for another pedagogy emerges, for another thought to emerge. “You have to have thoughts, not just points of view!” Warns Nietzsche (2000, p. 40).

A second postulate refers to the fact that virtual education has excluded the body from training; the theory of cognition, has the founding role for the subject to leave the body and institute only as “brain”; our dissidence lies in a practice that makes possible the formation without the center being the brain, to invent a practice on the part of the educator in which it can be formed, without a cognitive tree (therefore communicative), rather a rhizome that is saying of a pedagogy, this will be a pedagogy not of programmed linear, organized, theorized, but of educators who are prepared in (possibly) life, in a life without brains to develop, nor competent minds or communicative intelligences, no standardized communicative possibility, is the only source of knowledge?

Conclusions

In this brief tour of the history of virtual education in Colombia shows how in the last decades has implemented a strategy of power of the SIC that closely links economic production with the educational field. By virtue of this relationship a type of educator is constituted who must manage his knowledge and his formation to promote the teaching processes of the students.

In our archaeological route, it is clear that virtual education emerges by the integration of ICT to pedagogical and didactic practices in educational institutions. ICTs become the “sine qua non” for EV, so the discourses of various international and national multilateral agents, as well as governmental institutions, place the educator in the information and knowledge society as an operator of the ICT, whose function is to modulate the learning: to facilitate routes that lead to the development of competences.

Two characteristics of virtual education in Colombia have been traced so far in the speeches of governmental experts: communicative power and the integration of ICT. In light of these, the role of the educator is modified substantially: on the one hand, the central axis of its function is student learning, but not any learning, but ubiquitous learning mediated by ICT (virtuality versus presence); on the other hand, the training of educators is based on ICT competences at different levels for self-management of knowledge. Hence, educators should be concerned not to remain in the obsolescence of their old role and to form permanently.

The analysis of the knowledge / power strategy for the establishment of virtual education in Colombia makes visible a framework of legitimating discourses of the so-called Information and Knowledge Society. At the same time, the ICT boom and the crisis of the school are the conditions that allow the emergence of the discourse of virtual education. Educational virtualization has become a communication strategy, to make productive subjects in their learning.

The analysis of the legitimating discourses of virtuality identifies an interest in considering it part of the human being from a distant past, a consideration that fits perfectly with the discourse that promotes the inevitable need to introduce changes in education to link it to socio-economic transformations. The analysis also shows that virtual education reinforces the need for subjects to be interconnected and to be part of globalization and innovation, hegemonic statements of productivity in today's world. In addition, the discourses of opportunity or disadvantage of educators regarding the use of ICT question traditional practices of education.

We have found that the virtual educator is shaped as the subject of his own learning rather than as a subject for teaching. The learning in the virtuality becomes a mechanism of control by means of the information and the generalized communication, control that does not require closures; the educator is subject to the new mechanisms of control and at the same time is individualized; virtual education feeds much of the technological corporations; in short, is the process of persuasion and control, which generates monitoring of the workforce of industrial capitalism, the information society and communication. Thus, for example, the “subjects of virtualization” were formed in discourses such as self-learning or easy learning through ICT, in which control is exercised from the information; control that is not hidden since there are no limits to communication.

Virtual education, through a wide network of digital devices, makes a presence in the crisis of the disciplinary society and goes to the step of the control society. It determines dualities between abnormality and normality, between the updated and the obsolete, between innovative and traditional, between inclusion and exclusion, between effective and ineffective, between connected and unconnected. Likewise, it continues to demand the development of linguistic and technological skills for the training of subjects in the Information Society.

We have also wondered about the subject-educator type who has resisted the regime of virtual communication. In tracing the freedom practices of teachers linked to the Computadores para Educar program, we note that the SIC strategy makes their suspicions and questionings invisible, judging them as manifestations of fear and apathy for the use of ICTs. But the reason these teachers do not use ICT is because they consider them “dangerous”, unreliable to give real training to students.

Finally, we have proposed two postulates for a possible dissent regarding the hegemonic discourse of virtual education: the first is to practice a rhizomatic formation, not SIC; and the second to question an education directed solely to the brain, through a struggle against the power of cognitive approaches to pedagogy.