LEVINAS AND THE ‘‘INTER-FACE’’: THE ETHICAL CHALLENGE OF ONLINE EDUCATION Michalinos Zembylas Faculty of Education Intercollege, Cyprus, and Michigan State University Charalambos Vrasidas Faculty of Education Intercollege, Cyprus Computers have introduced into our common experience ‘‘ideas about the in- stability of meanings and the lack of universal and knowable truths.’’ 1 Online edu- cation, in particular, serves as a site for alternative enactments of the self, that is, the embodiment of multiple identities in learners. 2 These multiple identities are rather complex: they are enactments of the self implicated in the politics, econom- ics, and ethics of everyday life. The capacity of the Web to produce learning envi- ronments that are supportive of hybrid identities, complex discourses, and multiple relations among learners raises questions about the ethical response of online educators: How are identity and communication constituted in online edu- cation? What are the features of an ethical pedagogy in online education — that is, a pedagogy that considers the ethical implications of online communication? These questions focus on the analysis of online pedagogies as ethical processes for creating the Other. Such questions do not provide us with any fixed ethical framework for analyzing the complexities of online education; however, they do help us think in alternative ways about the ethical dimensions of online education itself. In other words, online education becomes a site for ethical investigation con- cerning ‘‘the nature, meaning, and moral worth of the educational enterprise it- self.’’ 3 In addition, this project opens up possibilities for investigating the ethics of how difference matters in online relations. In this essay, we argue that Emmanuel Levinas’s views on ethics and otherness can overcome some of the ethical challenges posed by online education, while, at the same time, we acknowledge some of the limitations of this approach with re- spect to its implications for education. On the one hand, what is ethical becomes a respect for the absolute singularity of the Other and the irreducibility of otherness; on the other hand, this assumption is not completely unproblematic, because an 1. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 18. 2. Rick Voithofer, ‘‘Nomadic Epistemologies and Performative Pedagogies in Online Education,’’ Educa- tional Theory 52, no. 4 (2002): 479–494. 3. David Blacker and Jane McKie, ‘‘Information and Communication Technology,’’ in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education, eds. Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 234. EDUCATIONAL THEORY j Volume 55 j Number 1 j 2005 Ó 2005 Board of Trustees j University of Illinois 61