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It is important for faculty, students, and online program administrators to understand how the online course interface mediates the e-learning space during the instruction of an online course, resulting in shifts of instructor identity, student identities, course content, and pathways to achieving learning goals.

To fully understand the concept of identity mediation, it is necessary to accept the point of view that the concept is essentially a modernist or postmodernist notion promulgated by Marxist and post-Marxist critics. Although the provenance is difficult to determine, one can say that the dialogue was pushed to the forefront with the French psychologist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), who argued his seminars given in the 1950s, and compiled in The Ego in Freud’s Theory (Lacan 1991) that language (and semiotics) function to destabilize and decenter the self.

Influenced by French Surrealists Jean Cocteau and others, Lacan grew to hold the idea that the self (or “subject”) is a construct that is acted upon by outside forces (Dean 1992). The self is not only decentered, but it is also fragmented and made fragmentary by the influence of meaning-generating discourses, which encompass the destabilizing effects of language, images, film, and any discourse containing semiotically-active components.

The controversial psychologist, R. D. Laing, whose The Divided Self 1960), and Self and Others (1961), developed a paradigm for explaining how social forces shape a conception of identity and self, provided pivotal theoretical bases for mechanisms of how self and subjectivity come to be effaced in a semiotic-inflected world. “Negotiated” meaning and realities are not too far afield from the findings of J. Bruner, who suggested that students learn in active settings because they are able to mediate the content, their world (the classroom), and their sense of themselves and others in order to make connections with prior experiences and self-concept (Bruner, 1960). His views take issue with those of behaviorists, who focus on cause and effect, conditioning, and relationships dynamics, with less focus on the underlying epistemologies at play in the equation.

Later, critical post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault further explore the anti-essence of self, and the idea that the subject (self and individual identity) starts as a construction, undergoes erasure as a result of social forces, and later can be reconstructed as a result of following traces (Barker 1995). The basic instability of identity and/or a self is highly useful in the online environment, particularly if an individual looks at the Internet (whether in a discussion board or learning space) as a place to construct / deconstruct identity. Sherry Turkle explores the process of identity erasure and construction in her influential book, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. In it, she explores the negotiations that occur, and which are largely conscious (although some are unconscious) as the Internet gives an individual the power to mediate his or her own persona. Patricia Wallace takes the analysis a bit further in The Psychology of the Internet, and evaluates how the loss of non-verbal cues creates an environment that privileges written discourse, and the arrangement of icons on a screen.

Mediation in the online course environment has been explored in terms of how class interaction alters, changes or “mediates” the content, instructional strategy, and the relation between the individuals. Tracey Hall (1999) presents results of research on how peer-to-peer interaction mediates the learning space and the learning environment. In doing so, Hall expands the findings of Campbell etal (1991) and applies them to an online environment. Technology-mediated instruction comprises a significant field of study within the area of educational policy, instructional design, and educational psychology. Best practices have been developed, and are detailed in publications such as Guidelines for Good Practice: Technology-Mediated Instruction (Matthews etal, 1997) published by the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. The guidelines are useful and they focus primarily on practice and pedagogy. However, they do not look specifically at how the instructor’s identity, function, and role are mediated by the technology, and specifically by the interface. It would be very useful to examine an aspect of technology-mediated education, online learning and instruction that has been fairly overlooked by researchers and in the literature.
REFERENCES CITEDBarker, Steven. “Nietzsche/Derrida, Blanchot/Beckett: Fragmentary Progressions of the Unnamable.” Bruner, J. The Process of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.
Bruner, J. Toward a Theory of Instruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966.
Campbell, B.J., Brady, M.P.,& Linehan, S. Effects of peer-mediated instruction on the acquisition and generalization of written capitalization skills. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 24, 1, 6-14, 1991.
Dean, Carolyn.- The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject, 1992.

Hall, Tracey, and Andrea Stegila. “Peer-mediated Instruction and Intervention” CAST: National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum.

Lacan, Jacques.- The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954 - 1955, 1991.

Matthews, Ric; Bunn, Christine; Gustafson, Kathleen; Megill, Dave; and Kathleen O’Connor. Guidelines for Good Practice: Technology Mediated Instruction. Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. Retrieved 20 January 2004, 1997

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Wallace, Patricia. The Psychology of the Internet. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.