The ecologies of presence in onlife education

Abstract

The development of digitality and connectivity enable humans to create new ways of being present, in spaces of digital nature or even of hybrid nature. The advent of platforms and digital environments favor a new technological social situation resulting from a non-subject-centric ecology and a computerized habitative condition. In the field of Education, these new forms of presence, enhanced by digital inventive methodologies and practices, engage humans in different presences, constituting different ways of operating teaching and learning processes. It is in this context that we refer to an ecology of presence in OnLIFE Education, meaning, a particular type of presence that goes beyond being linked to a space-temporal, geographic and digital nature, which presents itself as a complex ecology of interactions which are incomprehensible through real and virtual dichotomies. This paper, through various technological typologies of the presence in education, referring to telepresence, digital virtual presence, the relational, cognitive and social presence, proposes an interpretation that digital or hybrid spaces establish a new type of social, technological and informatized situation, as an expression of an atopic  quality of interactions that associates people, data, software and information architectures.