Stephen Downes is provoking reading for Saturday morning, when you are supposed to forget about work and to do something else. I like to find there an opposing voice to Elliott Masie and a lot of sharp comments.
Of course, the selection of links is great. Few things I found interesting:
Talking Past Each Other: Making Sense of the Debate over Electronic Publication about print scholarly publishing vs. on-line peer-reviewed
The Illusion of E-learning: Why We Are Missing Out On the Promise of IP Technology – discussion about lack of measures of e-learning effectiveness and (related) dependence on technology.
- Developers don’t seem to be aware of how people learn, for they continue to use mostly flawed models.
- Corporations are more interested in throughput and low unit cost, so solid measures of effectiveness are infrequently developed or applied.
- The available platform drives the instructional strategy, which may not be appropriate to the learning style of trainees or to the learning objectives.
- The cost of development is high, so bad (cheap) programs drive out the good ones in the absence of any commitment to measure effectiveness.
- Effective e-learning experiences are rarely scalable
I think that this issue of “technology trap” is something realy important to address. From my own experience – I can’t design a course as platform-independent, I have to see features and tools available to tune learning activities I have in mind. And sometimes it drives me to the unexpected (bad or good). But this is only the part of the problem – my ideas of learning design are trapped in specific learning environments, and I don’t have much chance to reuse them – they are too large to fit to learning objects.
The New ISD: Applying Cognitive Strategies to Instructional Design - something to read when I have time :)
Tags: e-learningArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/08/10.html#a116; comments are here.
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