Addresses one of three major challenges facing distance education--its claimed overreliance on behaviorist approaches to teaching and learning. Maintains that distance learning encourages students to review their own learning approaches and to be more proactive about their study methods. (CFR)

Maintains that open and distance education represents contemporary education forms that respond to the shift to late-modernity, especially in educational technology and student-teacher relationships. Drawing on the work of Anthony Giddens, uncovers relationships among distance education, late-modernity, and the self. (CFR)

Maintains that a major theme in Lev Vygotsky's later research was concept formation or conceptual development in child development. States that Vygotsky argued that the acquisition of mature academic concepts forms the crowning achievement of adolescence. Argues that the view raises a number of criticisms. (CFR)