The Internet is Unwell...and Will Not Be at School Today: Oppositions, Omissions and Online Anxiety

It might be useful to be explicit about what this paper does not contain. This paper will not contain hearty recommendations of online learning from seasoned professionals in the field, or from the confident learners who have been lucky enough to work with them. This paper will not contain a defence of online learning (neither, however, is it intended as an attack on the same, or as an evagination of the manifold accounts of successful online learning projects that bespatter the World Wide Web). It will not contain a comprehensive overview of online learning practices around the globe (assuming that such a study would be possible at anything less than book length, anyway). Nor is this paper’s ambition (or that of its author) such that a more localised examination of the online learning environment in UK Universities has been undertaken. Instead of any of the above, this paper presents a picture of a Fragile Learner, struggling and anxious in the online milieu, and attempts to view his plight through the lens of psychoanalytic applications. In the course of researching this work, however, the author discovered a good deal of anxiety among colleagues who had been asked to work in this way for the first time in an attempt to meet learner demand. Using transcripts of short interviews with three anxious colleagues, the aim is to show how debilitating an enforced teaching role on the Internet can be, and we apply to the learning process the theoretical work of Carl Rogers, Jacques Lacan and John Steiner. We discover that Rogers had discussed the Fragile Learner as long ago as the middle of the previous century, in all but name; and by employing a stitchworked tapestry of anecdotes and memories, the former of which are accurate and the latter of which are subject to the customary erosion caused by time, self-protection and chronic narcissism, the paper refers to a learner’s shame and humiliation in online learning.