From the start of using Kajabi in late 2020, I felt enabled by design to arrange the learning content in relation to a number of vital applications: emails, surveys, targeted feedback, assessments, customer relationship management, web pages, conditional automation and more.

Kajabi by design

In turn, the integrated applications included in Kajabi enabled me to differentiate and personalise every part of 'the product' I offered within my curriculum design. Thus, the three terms that became my mantra as I used the software became relationships, pedagogy and audiences. These defined for me the dynamic of Kajabi's online environment.

Relationships because teaching and learning, as Loris Malaguzzi emphasised in The Hundred Languages of Children so admirably, were nothing if not an exchange:

Learning and teaching should not stand on opposite banks and just watch the river flow by; instead, they should embark together on a journey down the water. Through an active, reciprocal exchange, teaching can strengthen learning and how to learn. (1998, 83)

Pedagogy because that's what was at the heart and soul of all that I do in education. It's my job as an educator to model the most effective way of learning-how-to-learn. I stand on the shoulders of giants like Maria Montessori, John Dewey, John Hattie and every past and contemporary explorer of what it means to learn with passion, courage, resilience and perseverance.

And audiences because I now live in a digital age in which the performative elements of human communications are signposted everywhere. Within the digital ecologies in which I now live, dialogue and conversation are ‘computer-mediated communication’, which Andrew Wood and Matthew Smith describe in Online Communication: Linking Technology, Identity, & Culture (2005, 2014) as ‘somehow different’. 

In turn, it is mainly the “blurring of technology with our everyday lives”, Wood and Smith suggest, which fuels tension in our moving from face-to-face to technology-assisted forms of communication. What this tension suggests is that, whether we like it or not, participating in learning online compels us into a kind of ‘performance art’.  Referring to sociologist Erving Goffman (1959) use of dramaturgy and the theatrical metaphor as an process by which humans enact everyday life, Wood and Smith note that it is Goffman’s work that “has been instrumental in advancing the understanding of how elements of performance contribute to what and how people communicate online”.