E-Learning CFP on globally networked learning in highereducation

CALL FOR PAPERS:

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Special Issue of E-Learning on globally networked learning in higher education
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E-Learning, a peer-reviewed international journal directed towards the study of e-learning in its diverse aspects, invites submissions for a special issue on “Globalizing Higher Education Across the Disciplines: Innovative Partnerships, Policies, and Pedagogies for Globally Networked Learning Environments,” guest edited by Doreen Starke-Meyerring.

Early national and global policy discourses around the role of the internet in higher education advanced utopian and dystopian understandings of the internet as a new global market for existing industrial-model, locally produced higher education courses and programs to be repackaged for global delivery and global trade online. As a result, hundreds of millions of public and private dollars have been spent on global internet-based higher education marketing consortia, many of which have since failed. As initial responses to digital technologies, these initiatives had largely tried to reproduce established institutionally bounded practices in digital environments, disregarding the networked nature and peer production potential of digital technologies, and therefore lacking pedagogical innovation to re-envision learning in a globally networked world.

At the same time, however, many faculty across the disciplines in higher education have begun to develop alternative pedagogies and learning environments that take advantage of the globally networked nature of digital technologies. These globally networked learning environments (GNLEs) connect students with peers, instructors, professionals, experts, and communities from diverse contexts to help students develop new ways of knowledge making and learn how to build shared learning and knowledge cultures across traditional boundaries, especially with peers and communities that have been the most marginalized and disadvantaged in the emerging global social and economic order. However, such GNLEs are difficult to develop because they require robust partnerships, must negotiate a multitude of divergent national and institutional local policies, and as innovations, face challenges of institutional support infrastructures and policies designed around traditional local classrooms.

The purpose of this special issue is to understand the current state of globally networked learning environments across disciplines in higher education and to advance insights into their development and sustainability. The special issue therefore invites both conceptual contributions that address larger questions surrounding GNLEs as well as research studies of GNLE development across disciplines, addressing questions such as these (among others):

- What is the current state of globally networked learning in higher education?
- How have GNLEs addressed issues of global and local social justice?
- What kind of disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge making do GNLEs enable that would be difficult to achieve in traditional institutionally bounded classrooms? How?
- What challenges do educators face in designing, implementing, and sustaining such partnered learning environments? How do they overcome them?
- How do national and global policies regulating higher education as well as those regulating digital technologies (e.g. privacy, intellectual property, and censorship policies) enable or constrain the development of GNLEs?
- How do local institutional policies, including policies regulating digital technologies, enable or constrain the development of GNLEs?
- What institutional initiatives (e.g., task forces, innovator networks, centres for research and faculty support, integrated support networks) have emerged to support the work of faculty innovators?
- What research is needed to advance globally networked learning environments in higher education?

Schedule:
 Proposals indicating the purpose, rationale, and possible approach of contributions (250-500 words): January 31, 2009
 Submissions (full manuscripts): May 31, 2009
 Accepted manuscripts revised for publication: September 1, 2009
 Scheduled publication of issue: Winter 2010
Please direct inquiries and proposals to the guest editor:

Doreen Starke-Meyerring
doreen.starke-meyerring@mcgill.ca

Please also contact the editor if you are interested in serving as a reviewer for this special issue.

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Doreen Starke-Meyerring, Ph.D.
Associate Director, Centre for the Study and Teaching of Writing
Assistant Professor, Rhetoric and Writing Studies
Department of Integrated Studies in Education
McGill University
3700, rue McTavish
Montréal, QC H3A 1Y2, Canada

T: 514.398.1308
F: 514.398.4529
E: doreen.starke-meyerring @ mcgill.ca
W: http://webpages.mcgill.ca/staff/group1/dstark1/web/starke-meyerring/

President, Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing/ Association candienne de rédactologie
http://casdw-acr.mcgill.ca