This notion of remediation should be taken, first of all, in its most obvious senses: (A) The dictionary meaning denotes an overcoming or remedying of learning disabilities or problems; and (B) a literalization of the word suggests an effort to re-constitute or replace existing media with some other media, presumably the ‘next best thing’. I also intend the term in a more technical sense that was initially introduced by David Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000). These authors have suggested that a “double logic” (p. 5) informs contemporary technological practice in communications. Operating on the basis of a conviction that new technologies should be thought of as extensions of technologies that are already in use, “only better” (p. 4), educators can be seen to join with other proponents of technological advance to pursue “twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy” (p. 5) – intensity of experience combined with simulation -- that promise to take the perceiver or audience member beyond the confines of the ‘real’. These dual logics can be deployed to remake education; but as part of the process, educators must often be willing to undertake a remaking of themselves. The more the first reconstruction succeeds, the more the latter can  become no longer a matter of choice but necessity.
The specific strategy that remediation efforts employ is to strengthen the sense of felt ‘presence’ that attaches to communications, mainly by improving techniques for mediating experience through images and sounds. The perceptual “sensorium” (see Ong, 1982) actually provides a more complex field of communicative experience, one that encompasses touch, taste, and smell along with sight and sound as elements of a holistic, integrative, bodily-sensory involvement. A certain perceptual sleight of hand is required, therefore, to make hyperpresence comparable and, ideally, even more immediate than actual co-presence, which entails the proximity (see Levinas, 1969) of an educational partner.
Bolter and Grusin identify how the remediation process “attempts to achieve immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and the act of mediation” (p. 11). The futuristic film Strange Days provides a fictional exemplar. The narrative unfolds around the potentialities of a technological wonder called ‘The Wire’, which is able to “transfer sense experiences from one person to another” (p. 3), virtually unmediated, from consciousness to consciousness. Freed from the encumbrances of head-mounted display units with their anomalous, low-tech appearance, seekers after the virtually real can live out the promise of unparalleled immediacy of contact and mutuality. The educational revolution this could herald is the stuff not only of future hopes, but also of present imaginings: The student is empowered to know everything the teacher knows and to determine the relevancy of it all for himself or herself – the ultimate active learner. The teacher becomes one ready-to-hand (see Heidegger, 1977) environmental influence among others.
The step back from science fiction futurism to the educational planning present is significant, but in many ways also rather small one. An important link is this forgetting or bracketing of the medium and mediation that Bolter and Grusin emphasize.