You know how it is. You are invited to deliver a keynote at a conference and you have to come up with a topic and a title at short notice, so you think of something that sounds interesting (you hope) and that will give you scope for an interesting talk.
Chris Evans, of Brunel University, kindly invited me to speak at a conference on eLearning taking place at Brunel next Monday (6th) — I’m taking a day out of my holiday to attend, and I am looking forward to it. I chose my topic many weeks ago and I’m currently having some fun thinking through the scope of the talk I want to give around the title of:
There’s Good eLearning and there’s Bad eLearning: how do we tell one from the other?
My approach — aside from some wariness about the term ‘eLearning’ itself — will be to explore those features and characteristics of online learning, in its widest definition, that I believe match or fall short of a sound philosophy of learning. Of course, such an approach will be highly subjective, but I hope to raise a few issues that will give those attending something to talk about.
I want to look at issues as diverse as ‘creepy treehouse syndrome’, the folly of ‘community building’ as opposed to ‘community growing’ (Stephen Downes, as you might expect, is strong on this issue), the centrality of network learning, the power and importance of ‘unlearning’, and the changing nature of what it means to be educated today (a topic I have written and spoken about before — see here for instance). I also intend to take a potshot or two at the corporate form of eLearning so beloved of large (and not-so-large) firms around the world.
Any thoughts, ideas, provocations on this topic would be more than welcome!
Technorati Tags: elearning, brunel university, chris evans, conference
Explain how teachers everywhere are trying to use eLearning and so forth yet get blocked at every turn by half witted IT experts at Council level.…
John,
Wouldn’t the answer to your question be exactly the same if you simply dropped the “e”? For so many of the most clamorous voices in our field, learning is a process not a goal. What often strikes me as somewhat sad, is that the “learning” part of the neologism is used almost always as a rather tacky participle, not as the difficult and demanding noun used by civilised men for centuries. What else does “personalised learning” imply but an individual process or journey, open to all. In the minds of all great teachers: isn’t learning always a goal?
Online, as never before, a learner must always consider the source. Good elearning begins for most by learning to identify the good sources.
Hi John, you may remember when we were in Singapore I gave a talk called “Techno or No-Tech — which is better?” The problem with terms such as “e-learning” is it puts the focus on one small part of the learning support service, sometimes at the expense of more fundamental needs, including the ability to touch and smell, or move around in order to dispell nervous energy. Perhaps “E-learning in context” rather than “E-learning AS context” would help.
All great comments, to which I will respond when I am fully connected (my only access at the moment is through my iPhone).
Joe — I had fully intended making a point that is close to the one you make, though perhaps with a slightly different emphasis. I did note my own wariness with the term in my post — however, the event itself us billed as an ‘eLearning’ conference, so it would be discourteous of me not to take the term seriously.
Sean — ‘context is all’ — I absolutely agree. I do think though that many (most) who still choose to use the term ‘eLearning’ (outside the corporate context) do not necessarily put all the emphasis on the ‘e’.
I hope to respond more fully later.
I agree with Joe. Bad E-Learning is when you try to do something just because you can and just because it’s using technology.
I’m a ‘Director of E-Learning’ but I just ignore the ‘E’ — it’s all about the learning.
Joe’s comment that you could drop the ‘e’ could be taken further — you could drop the ‘elearning’ and the question remains the same. How do we differentiate the good and bad _anything_? The danger is we create a checkbox of characteristics ‘good’ things have, but we can then find examples that don’t meet those criteria, yet which we all acknowledge are ‘good’. This is the Wittgenstein game problem — there is no single definition that would include all the things we recognise as games, yet we know what a game is when we see one. So rather it is about similarity/closeness to a stereotype (or archetype). So we could maybe draw up an archetype of ‘good’ elearning and then we have something to measure against.
Grainne has done some good working on trying to articulate different representations of courses here: http://e4innovation.com/?p=328 which might be useful also.
Martin
[…] This post was Twitted by JConnell […]
Bad elearning: relying on the technology to do the teaching for you. Thinking that a new tool will substitute for engagement and interest in your students.
Good elearning: using the technology to support good teaching to facilitate learning opportunites. Being enthusiastic, supporting your students, encouraging them to work to their potential, helping them to make connections and understand the possibilities for self directed learning opportunities. Forget the e, and focus on the learning.
John, this is not entirely on topic, but with the huge variety of tools and sources of information available today, is it not better that teaching becomes a matter of setting learning targets and letting the students to a large extent determine the method.
In pre-Internet days it was probably reasonable for a teacher to determine the method. Aiming to teach about a scientific law, the only source of information would be books and the best method of recording would be an exercise book and a pen. However, today surely a teacher should set the objective, knowledge of Boyle’s Law. A student could then use the internet, either an online encyclopedia, a google search, or a textbook and record it in Word, a Powerpoint, a wiki or an exercise book. All are equally valid means to an end.
The most effective method of learning will be a matter for the student, given the known variety of learning styles.
It’s been interesting reading these comments — I’m still ambivalent about the ‘e’, persuaded both ways.
The presentation happened a couple of days ago, and John asked me to post a question I asked him from the floor directly afterwards. It was something like:
The vision of your presentation is far reaching and yet here we all are, sitting in rows facing the authority figure at the front, silent for an hour. It’s like the photo of the 1960s primary school in one of your slides. The difference between rhetoric and reality is stark. So my question is this. If all the constraints (about which we are all aware and understanding) were removed, would you change this presentation? If so, how? Is there anything you would try to preserve, and why?
Mira,
It was good to meet you at the event in Brunel and thanks for repeating your great question.
I intend to take the liberty of turning your question into a blog post so that we can open it out to a wider group. This is a perennial question for anyone working in or speaking about this general area of eLearning/Learning 2.0/Web 2.0 in education. I’l try to set it up as a post in its own right in the next day or so.
John
Thanks John. I forgot to say how much I enjoyed the presentation. I thought it was an excellent keynote, in that I kept returning to it throughout the event. That’s all for now, I will wait for your blog post with interest.
John
I am with those who believe this should work without the ‘e’. But I must say whilst I have no problem with debating what makes for good and bad teaching, I do struggle to even define ‘bad learning’ — and no, I don’t necessarily recognise it when I see it. Let alone agree on what it is with colleagues.
Adding the ‘e’ allows us to focus debate on the role of the the technology — but still comes to subjective opinion on pedagogy rather than true insight into learning, good or bad.
Tony Parkin
An important aspect of “e-pedagogy” is course management and course organisation. This is often over-looked. This is more important in an online environment than traditional teaching. Clarity of purpose, clear instructions, good support, well explained assessment and transparent assessment criteria, are vital to good e-learning — and often badly done, leaving online learners unclear about what it is they have to do, how they are to do it, and unsure about how it will be assessed.
Bad e-learning? Letting learners “teach themselves” while the teacher gets on with more interesting things (like a late research paper) and dressing this up as “constructivist teaching approach”.
[…] Otra de las conferencias fue la de Jonh Connell de Cisco System, una visión muy interesante sobre el eLearning, el sentido de la convivenciaidad, las oportunidades de crecimiento y una de las ideas que me gustó mucho fue la del síndorme de la casa del árbol, una casa construida por adultos para los niños… creo que tengo que investigar más sobre esto, parece que el síndrome es más común de lo que parece, ¿No estamos en eso? La conferencia se llamó: There’s good eLearning and there’s Bad eLearning: how do we tell one from the other? […]
[…] start with bad eLearning. Here I’m able to make use of my personal learning network (PLN) because I asked this very question on my blog a few weeks ago, in preparation for a keynote talk I was giving at a conference at Brunel […]
[…] Otra de las conferencias fue la de Jonh Connell de Cisco System, una visión muy interesante sobre el eLearning, el sentido de la convivenciaidad, las oportunidades de crecimiento y una de las ideas que me gustó mucho fue la del síndorme de la casa del árbol, una casa construida por adultos para los niños… creo que tengo que investigar más sobre esto, parece que el síndrome es más común de lo que parece, ¿No estamos en eso? La conferencia se llamó: There’s good eLearning and there’s Bad eLearning: how do we tell one from the other? […]
[…] available here along with a detailed round-up of the material I covered. I was asked to reprise a talk I gave at Brunel University a couple of years ago, which I was happy to do, but I have been able to change and update some of […]