“New” trends in online learning are not so new
Here’s an innocent statement I just can’t let go without commenting on. In a post yesterday (”LearnHub Relaunches Its Social Learning Network“) Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch said that “Online education has been booming recently…”
Online education is not a recent innovation. Large-scale corporatisation of education is a recent innovation - if you can call it an innovation. I happen to think that “innovation” carries a far more positive connotation than this financially driven trend deserves.
For as long as the internet has been in existence, forward thinking educators have been finding creative ways to harness its capacity to connect people and experiment with new ways to facilitate and encourage learning - and this is not limited to the likes of the learning managment system.
Certainly the financial success of Blackboard and WebCT play an influential role in this respect. However there are those who would argue other avenues are as effective - if not more so - in the facilitation of learning than the LMS.
It’s critical to bear in mind that there is a tremendous amount of activity in online learning that is taking place in the contemporary and emerging spheres of new media, social software and other so-called Web 2.0 application.
Names like Brian Lamb, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, the New Media Consortium, and a legion of other educational innovators have been exploring the educational potential of new technologies for literally years now - and in some cases decades. For years now they have also been discussing exactly the same themes covered by Joshua Porter regarding the Social View of Learning that is suddenly being touted as “new” by some just because it’s hit TechMeme.
The big difference between the corporate- or capitalistic-leaning sects and those of the recently and somewhat jokingly dubbed “edupunk” sect are in the underlying ideology of mashups, a do-it-yourself mentality, and above all affording learners and educators sufficient flexibility and opportunity to guide and discover their own learning paths. They thrive on open source technology, and the the notions of sharing and reuse.
It is these sorts of visions that inspired the open courseware initiatives we are starting to see emerging in the form of MIT’s OCW Initiative, Connexions, and others.
It is perhaps of little surprise then that this inherently dollar-less economy has not hit the airwaves of the venture capitalists that frequent sites like TechCrunch. They speak two different languages and deal in completely different currencies. Neither of them is more or less relevant than the other. They just don’t tend to view the tapistry of emerging technology in quite the same way.
Thursday, June 12th, 2008