When one enters the relatively bland learning space of an online or hybrid distance course, it is very tempting to think that the learners will be as uniform and predictable as the interface itself. If each course has the “same look and feel,” does the blandness precondition the learner to think that all the other learners will similarly possess the “same look and feel” as all the other e-learners? How will the e-learner consider other learners in the course with him or her? Will they be assumed to be all the same, too? Will the learner be unconsciously conditioned to assume that all the learners are mere echoes (or mirror images) of himself or herself? Continue reading ‘Cookie Cutter Courses: Unconsciously Discouraging Diversity?’
Archive for April, 2005
I wanted to wait until we were on the other side of April 1 so that no one would think this article was a joke. In the United States, we spend billions of dollars on efforts to put technology in the classroom. My purpose here is not to say that the money is necessarily misspent, but rather to point out that there is a real limit on what can be achieved by putting technology inside a physical classroom. Continue reading ‘It’s Just Fine Not to Use Technology in the Classroom’
Here is a recap of significant posts in the edublogging community from the past 48 hours. Continue reading ‘Daily Tribute’
About fifteen years ago I was spending a lazy afternoon floating on rafts in the river with a friend of mine while our wives and kids tried to catch fish upstream. I remember the afternoon well because of something my friend, a researcher for Motorola, claimed. He said that hardware was already becoming less expensive than software and that, at some point, to would be essentially free. Continue reading ‘The Next Big Shift’
Transcript
I’m not a Catholic but when I was twelve, I went to confessional with my best friend, Rob Watcher. To be honest, I don’t remember many details, but it must have been positive in some way because I went home and asked my mother if we could join. Continue reading ‘The Pope and Technology — Lessons for Education’
Rehearsal and repetition may be bad for learning. They are even worse for learners at a distance for whom external influences such as work stress, frequent travel, deployment to war zones, and personal or family issues are creating learning anxiety. This is the conclusion reached by several learning specialists and educational psychologists who studied why students perform poorly even after adhering closely to the “practice makes perfect” traditional cognitive learning strategies of rehearsal, organization, and elaboration. Continue reading ‘Learning Anxiety and the Online Student: Learning Strategies that Work’
We’ve been talking all week about digital content in education and how we will arrive at a future where content is easy to create, store in a coherent fashion, and distribute (Click here to read Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , or Part 4 of this series). Continue reading ‘Dialing for Your Tagging Dollars — Part 5′
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