Brave New Classrooms:

Educational Democracy and the
Internet

Call for Papers

One of the most idealistic promises of the internet as a
medium has been its democratic potential. In working to keep faith with
that promise, many educators seek reinforcement for a progressive
political belief that good education leads towards social justice.
Although this promise still glimmers, teachers who want to pursue the
democratic potential of the internet and electronic education have
increasingly encountered forces of homogenization, standardization,
censorship, hierarchy and corporatization. This edited volume,
entitled Brave New Classrooms: Educational Democracy and the Internet,
will examine the "other" side of online learning.In exploring the
political, economic and social underpinnings of internet education, the
collection will cast light on those areas frequently ignored or glossed
over by the critical literature, which typically focuses on pedagogical
techniques to the exclusion of wider questions of power, hegemony, and
the place of education within society.

It will ask whether, how and to
what degree it is possible to overcome political, economic and social
restrictions so that online learning might still realize some of its
promise as a tool for building a more democratic and pluralistic
society.

Possible themes include the political theory of electronic
education;
the erosion of the public good of education;
the relationship
of online education to capitalism and globalization;
the commodification
and marketing of electronic courses;
privatization and corporatization
via electronic education;
changing models of pedagogy in the online
arena;
the disparity between the rhetoric, practices and underpinnings
of online teaching and learning;
critiques of intellectual content and
educational value of electronic courses;
monolingualism and
multilingualism in electronic education;
race, ethnicity, gender or
sexuality in electronic course design;
the digital divide and
differential social access to internet learning resources;
emergent
intellectual property regimes, the knowledge commons, and university
copyright practices for electronic course content;
restrictive
portalization and learning access;
use of proprietary software and
open-source software in educational contexts;
and, finally, what
potential there may remain for visions of progressive education via
computers and the internet.

There will be particular interest in essays
with global, trans-national, or cross-cultural perspectives.

Papers
should be approximately 3000-5000 words in length and follow APA style,
with endnotes used in preference to footnotes. As the volume is
intended for publication in the US, American spellings should be used.


Draft papers are due by 31 December 2004 and should be sent, preferably
in electronic version, to both co-editors listed below. Potential
authors are invited to submit enquiries or abstracts prior to this date
for comment by the editors.

Editors:
Joe Lockard,
English Department,

Arizona State University,
POB 870302,
Tempe, Arizona, USA, 85287-0302,

or Joe.Lockard@asu.edu

Mark Pegrum,
Centre for Applied Language
Studies,
University of Dundee,
Dundee DD1 4HN,
Scotland, UK,
or m.a.pegrum@dundee.ac.uk