When performance is the product: Problems in the analysis of online distance education

This article examines two ideologies that have been prominent in recent, if not current, education thinking. The first is that means can be separated from ends (or processes from products); the second is that learning is merely a process of knowledge acquisition. Attention to these ideologies arises from two projects in the overlapping fields of information and communications technology (ICT) and instructional design. Both projects attend to conversation as an educational resource. They are animated by the questions: should a conversation be regarded as an activity in context or can it be decoupled from the circumstances that define it as a conversation? In other words, does a conversation take place within an environment, or by means of the environment? Relating these questions to the changing view of ICT held within the European Community, the article uses a bricolage of ideas from economic history, communication theory and discourse analysis to summarise how such inherited ideologies might be realigned in the analysis of online conversation.