Re: [xmca] E-Learning article from TC Record

Hi Luisa--

So lets have a joint seminar in January! If we use Skype we could have
several XMCA folks
interested in this topic present. OR, you could give a talk to LCHC and we
could discuss . Then we could record and
make available to all.

Optimism needs to be fed by success. So lets create some success.
mike

On Dec 22, 2007 3:47 PM, <laires@univ-ab.pt> wrote:

> Hi everyone
> Jay presents us very interesting questions about online learning: "Why do
> we imagine that learning goals must come first, and that social
> relationships are then brought in only secondarily in online learning?
> Would it not be productive to reverse this (in order to restore a more
> balanced dialectic for change and development) and imagine that FIRST one
> needs to build a social community to which people come to participate in
> interesting activities with others they like, admire, or feel challenged
> by? And THEN we can expect significant learning to ALSO happen, and start
> to think about how it might be democratically shaped and guided within
> such a community?
>
> Online Education restores social dimension to distance education, strongly
> diminished by some traditional distance education models. Usually it is
> believed that learning goals come first and only then social relations
> should be considered. Perhaps this is due to the fact that our educative
> models are still connected to a cartesian perspective. We frequently
> separate cognition and emotion, disregarding the last one; we separate
> individual and social dimension of learning, enhancing the first one and
> minimizing the second one. From my point of view, learning goals and
> social relation shouldn't be ranked but they should coexist in a
> dialectical relationship.
> Michael and Paul point out a question that will be the greatest challenge
> of online education (specially for the researchers that "Educate in the
> Internet"): the control and centralization of communication and learning.
> As Mike says, it's impossible to foresee the potential uses of the
> internet to mediate education in the next decade. However I feel
> optimistic about the future. The use of distributed and collaborative
> educative models will enable us to re-evaluate teachers and students´
> roles and even to question traditional power of science on learning. Are
> we facing the emergence of a new educational paradigm? What's your opinion
> about this issue?
>
> Luísa Aires
> (Univ. Aberta, Portugal)
>
> > I cannot contribute reducing Michael's frustrations, but I believe it is
> > really unclear what the potential uses of the internet to mediate
> > education
> > will become in the next
> > decade, but I hope that those who theorize these matters will take into
> > considertion the considerable positive educational experiences we have
> > been
> > able to use
> > by connecting colleges classes to each other, running live, interactive,
> > clasess with an "up close" , almost face-face feel to them, to small
> joint
> > seminars where it
> > really does feel "face to face"...... the distance and technical
> > mediation
> > becomes transparent and great education can occur.
> >
> > Even Skype, which is currently free in many parts of the world, has
> > enabled
> > some great academic discussions at great distance that otherwise would
> not
> > take place at all.
> >
> > These are very modest beginning, but they have been very successful
> > beginnings, of new forms of international academic discouses on topics
> of
> > concern..
> >
> > mike
> >
> > On Dec 17, 2007 10:03 AM, Paul Dillon <phd_crit_think@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Michael,
> >>
> >> You wrote: "Can we handle promoting an education model
> >> that we can't control?"
> >>
> >> Doesn't the answer to this question depend on who is incuded in the
> >> "we"?
> >> It's pretty clear that the system that produces "experts" will have a
> >> hard
> >> time handling it.
> >>
> >> Paul
> >>
> >>
> >> Michael Glassman <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu> wrote:
> >> Jay,
> >>
> >> This is a fascinating issue. I find two cultures developing with a deep
> >> divide between them. There is the culture that wants to educate using
> >> the
> >> internet and there is the culture that is already using the internet to
> >> educate. To be honest I found the recent article in TCR on the internet
> >> and
> >> education to be really frustrating, talking about metaphors like the
> Web
> >> and
> >> Delivery Truck and such. What is interesting is that I never read these
> >> terms from people who are actually engaging on and participating with
> >> the
> >> internet rather than talking about the internet and what we should be
> >> doing
> >> with the internet. Education on the internet from what I can tell has
> >> grown
> >> both exponentially, but also organically. I don't think anybody could
> >> have
> >> imagined the culture and the relationships surrounding blogs (not a
> >> metaphor
> >> but an actual description web logs, like the other terms that are
> >> generally
> >> used such as linkages, blogosphere, and net neutrality). The level of
> >> education that is
> >> occurring is amazing, right now surrounding primarily politics, but
> >> also
> >> including health, and food, and the arts - but it can't help but expand
> >> -
> >> and it has an extraordinary momentum. There are also the wiki
> platforms,
> >> most relevant wikipedia. Wikipedia is an example of how education on
> the
> >> internet grows organically. For those of you who don't know the
> history,
> >> wikipedia was originally meant to be an expert driven online
> >> encyclopedia.
> >> But while they were collecting experts they put together a wiki
> platform
> >> to
> >> discuss possible topics. There was such interest in the wiki version
> >> that
> >> the expert driven encyclopedia was jettisoned. Now google is attempting
> >> to
> >> develop gnoll, which is again an online, expert driven encyclopedia,
> but
> >> more advanced than what was originally proposed. Some think this will
> >> mean
> >> the end of wikipedia, but anybody who has really been paying attention
> >> knows
> >> that there is absolutely no way to know.
> >>
> >> And yet when I talk to people within the university of this new world I
> >> become as frustrated as I did reading the TCR article. Not only does
> >> there
> >> seem to be a need to keep knowledge centralized (which works against
> the
> >> natural tendencies of communication on the internet - and physicists
> are
> >> actually doing research to examine this), but there is also a real fear
> >> of
> >> loss of information - that somehow people can't be trust with
> >> information
> >> that is not vetted by experts. The best blogs are written by an
> eclectic
> >> group of people, many brilliant but on the margins or outside of
> >> academia.
> >> Can we handle promoting an education model that we can't control?
> >>
> >> Michael
> >>
> >> ________________________________
> >>
> >> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Jay Lemke
> >> Sent: Sun 12/16/2007 4:52 PM
> >> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> >> Subject: Re: [xmca] E-Learning article from TC Record
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> I was pleased to see this issue raised by Luisa
> >> Aires. Her message came just as I was
> >> corresponding online with Cesar Coll in Barcelona
> >> about visiting again with his project analyzing
> >> learning from records of online university courses.
> >>
> >> I also advised Ulric Bjorck in Sweden a few years
> >> ago on an analysis of a similar sort. In both
> >> cases some students participated both in online
> >> learning and in face-to-face seminars in the same
> >> course. In Australia, when I consulted for some
> >> projects there (at Deakin University and
> >> elsewhere), this mixed approach was then called "open learning".
> >>
> >> Luisa asks how distance education and online
> >> learning or open learning can be more responsive
> >> to the perspective and interests of the student
> >> (a la the Bologna ideals), and I think she is
> >> right to signal the importance of online social networks and
> identities.
> >>
> >> Too often, our online educational forums and
> >> learning environments are simply "broadcast"
> >> models -- a central controlling source, the
> >> professor or course committee, puts out the
> >> readings, the topics, the deadlines for
> >> participation, etc. At most, the students may
> >> raise unexpected questions, but they have little
> >> initiative, and the whole activity is defined as
> >> "work", not play, and so, in our dominant
> >> (non-Vygotskyan) approach, as not "social" either.
> >>
> >> But there is interesting research (e.g. by
> >> Diepstraten and DuBois-Reymond in the
> >> Netherlands) on alternate learning biographies,
> >> which shows that many successful young (i.e. 20s
> >> and 30s now, looking back) learners found formal
> >> schooling an obstacle and the learning they
> >> actually use in their lives came more through
> >> their social networks. Today, we know, those
> >> social networks are being formed as much or more
> >> online as in face--to-face encounters.
> >>
> >> Is it possible to design and conceptualize online
> >> learning, whether at a long distance or a short
> >> one, as PRIMARILY a social activity, which has
> >> significant learning as just one aspect, almost
> >> as a side-effect or an after-thought?
> >>
> >> If you consider online communities like Whyville
> >> (for learners at about age 10-15), which were
> >> designed for science and math learning, but in an
> >> informal way (cf. the offline 5th Dimension and
> >> Clase Magica projects), research by Yasmin Kafai
> >> at UCLA shows that social networking activity is
> >> a predominant motivation and occupation of
> >> participants, who also do online activities
> >> whereby they learn some things our official
> >> curriculum may value. In many other online
> >> communities, like xmca, we find people as
> >> interested in social contact as in learning. The
> >> large communities built around computer games are
> >> often like this, organized into "guilds" which
> >> not only plan adventures together, but also serve
> >> to apprentice newcomers and teach them how to play better.
> >>
> >> Why do we imagine that learning goals must come
> >> first, and that social relationships are then
> >> brought in only secondarily in online learning?
> >> Would it not be productive to reverse this (in
> >> order to restore a more balanced dialectic for
> >> change and development) and imagine that FIRST
> >> one needs to build a social community to which
> >> people come to participate in interesting
> >> activities with others they like, admire, or feel
> >> challenged by? And THEN we can expect significant
> >> learning to ALSO happen, and start to think about
> >> how it might be democratically shaped and guided within such a
> >> community?
> >>
> >> JAY.
> >>
> >> PS. The Meyer article cited by Luisa is freely
> >> available online, from 2005, and its official citation is:
> >> Teachers College Record Volume 107 Number 8, 2005, p. 1601-1625.
> >> [I have some reservations about the Lakoff
> >> approach to cultural metaphors, but it can
> >> stimulate reflexive thinking about the biases
> >> built into our common discourses on a topic.]
> >>
> >>
> >> At 03:58 PM 12/16/2007, you wrote:
> >> >Hi Mike & All
> >> >
> >> >Regarding the expansion of Internet, when we think about Distance
> >> >Education we also think about online education and e-learning. This
> new
> >> >way of Educating is suffering a fast diffusion and it's usually seen
> as
> >> a
> >> >business area. These two facts have strongly influenced the discourses
> >> and
> >> >practices. There are several checklists suggesting ways to offer a
> >> >successful online education; we can also find romantic perspectives,
> >> which
> >> >consider that online education will solve all life long learning
> >> problems.
> >> > However, these light points of view do not answer the demands of
> >> online
> >> >education actors (the same way they have never answered to the
> >> >expectations of face to face educational actors).
> >> >Metadiscoursive analysis may help to deconstruct some myths related to
> >> >online education. Katrina Meyer's article "Common Metaphors and Their
> >> >Impact on Distance Education...(http://www.tcrecord.org ) points out
> >> some
> >> >metaphors that show us another perspective about online distance
> >> >education.
> >> >In European Universities, "Bologna process" privileges the student's
> >> role
> >> >. But we can't forget that these students belong to cultural and
> social
> >> >networks that construct their identity. Therefore it is important for
> >> >online education researches to be developed according to theoretical
> >> >references such us CHAT and Sociocultural Theory. As far as Vygotski's
> >> >perspective is concerned it is important to explore how students
> learn,
> >> in
> >> >which settings they do it and also their motives, tools... Theoretical
> >> >source of neovygotskian research is a promising way to study online
> >> >education. How can we reinterpret online education (in University) in
> a
> >> >cultural historical view?
> >> >
> >> >Best regards,
> >> >Luísa Aires
> >> >(Universidade Aberta, Portugal)
> >> >
> >> >_______________________________________________
> >> >xmca mailing list
> >> >xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> >> >http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >>
> >>
> >> Jay Lemke
> >> Professor
> >> University of Michigan
> >> School of Education
> >> 610 East University
> >> Ann Arbor, MI 48109
> >>
> >> Tel. 734-763-9276
> >> Email. JayLemke@UMich.edu
> >> Website. www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke> <
> http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >>
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> >>
> >>
> >>
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Received on Sat Dec 22 16:47 PST 2007