Hi Everyone,
I hope that your week is off to a good start and that all those supporting the “back to schooler’s” in our class have had a smooth transition!
I just wanted to expand a bit further on the Weller book. In the history that Weller presents, the first part of the book as many of you have identified in your blogs, representative of an “early history.” The foundations of the read-write Web, the protocol-based Internet, early educational theory that aligns with how the modern Web works, and so on. “Early history” of course depends on the lens one is using, and depending on how far we zoom out, that “early history” may look different. It may feature film strips in the military for example. Or, the radio as an educational technology. Or, television. While Weller isn’t covering these, both the radio and TV have a rich history in the field as they were used in unique ways for distance education. To give you a sense of the history of DE in Canada, I have attached a not-for-circulation version of a paper written by colleagues as we worked on the Alberta DE review project several years ago. You can see in this paper that some of those early discussions focused on access to technology and access to education and how those differ between people, and between contexts.
This week, we are going to move closer to current time and delve deeper into aspects of the Web that brought us the social platform that it is today. As we are doing so, we are also going to be seeing the field’s interdisciplinary foundations. I am a firm believer in interdisciplinarity because it allows us to tackle problems or develop solutions from multiple perspectives.
For example, we can think about online learning from
· a design perspective (e.g. “how do we design opportunities for deep engagement?”),
· from an engineering perspective (e.g., “how do we create learning opportunities that scale to hundreds or thousands of people?”),
· from a data science perspective (e.g., “what data do we need to collect to make online learning more effective?”),
· or even from a moral philosophical perspective (e.g., “should the online platforms we are developing be collecting all these data from students?”).
On the other hand, the field’s interdisciplinarity seems to have caused trouble at times, as newcomers may fail to recognize that behind all the shiny new technologies there is a long history and that we know quite a bit already about how people learn, how they learn with technology, and how some pedagogies may serve some goals better than others. The last few years in particular have seen many re-inventions of the wheel – which as you saw is a grounding idea in the book we are reading.
In terms of the web as the social platform it is today, the Centre for Humane Technologies has created two “documentaries” that provide useful insight and context for both social media and AI. They are definitely worth your time if you have not yet seen them. If you have to focus on one, the more recent one on AI (the AI dilemma) is worth the time investment.
Enjoy the read this week. Have fun examining ideas and if you are listening to the audio version – the in-between the chapters sections are very insightful as well. As always, don’t hesitate to reach out if I may be of any help!
Ciao,
Elizabeth