Towards a Theory of Onlife Ecology (TEO): Lexicon, Conceptual Framework, and Generative Criterion for Higher Education in the Post-Digital Era
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7346/-fei-XXIV-02-26_02Keywords:
Generative presence, Post-digital, Onlife, Community of Inquiry, Transactional distance, Higher EducationAbstract
In the post-digital era, technology is no longer a channel separate from experience; it forms the ordinary fabric of everyday life and of education and training. Under these conditions, the vocabulary used in regulation and in part of the literature, including distance, telematic, and synchronous/asynchronous, remains modelled on twentieth-century transmissive technologies and continues to shape accreditation, instructional design, and evaluation. Based on a structured narrative review oriented towards theory building, this paper proposes the Theory of Onlife Ecology – TOE, a middle-range theory that articulates presence into three modes: somatic-contextual (PSC), re-emerged/augmented (PRA), and algorithmic-synthetic (PAS). These modes are organised within an ecosystemic architecture culminating in generative presence, understood as the conscious and documentable production of learning evidence. The framework is systematically compared with the Community of Inquiry, including its recent extensions, and with Transactional Distance Theory; for each construct, the differentiating element and an observable divergent prediction are specified. Three critical phenomena endogenous to the onlife ecosystem are also outlined qualitatively: semiotic saturation, dissociated distance, and metacognitive laziness. The paper concludes with ethical considerations concerning presence monitoring and with policy implications, framed conditionally, for regulatory vocabulary and higher education accreditation. Formalisation of the model and validation of the observational tools are deferred to a dedicated companion paper.
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