Blog posts

Community and context are the two critical factors in developing e-learning environments.

You may have noticed three separate islands where you work. There's an island of senior executives with their top-down, bottom line, control-freak approach to the other islands. There's a far away island of gamers thriving on fun challenges and immersive gameplay. In between, there's an island of trainers, instructional designers and content developers struggling to reach out to both of the other islands.

The very intent of ISD, however, is its weakness – namely making explicit intended learning and planning clear, concise approaches to achieving intended outcomes. Clearly defining learning assumes “things won’t change” (content, nature of interactions, changes in related disciplines which impact the information being discussed) between the point of design and the point of learning. This may work for many fields – especially where change is not significant – but models which neglect the adaptive nature of learning and the emergent structure of interactions are less appropriate to today’s work environments than they were in the past.

<p>As stated, instructional design needs to make two substantial changes:</p> <blockquote> <p>1. Stop seeing learning design as a task that occurs in advance of the intended learning, and begin to see it as a part of the learning process itself<br> 2. Begin to focus more on the context of learning (designing environments of learning) and less so on the intended content of the learning activities (course, workshop, or program)</p></blockquote>

Two major sets of affordances offered in online learning are not found in traditional learning. First, online, communication occurs not through a channel, but through a network. And second, communication flows not merely through a passive medium but through a computational environment.

The theory of distributed representation has a profound implication for pedagogy, as it suggests that learning (and teaching, such as it is) is not a process of communication, but rather, a process of immersion. Put loosely, it suggests the idea of teaching not by telling or even demonstrating but rather through the creation (or identification) of an environment into which a learner may be immersed.

Anyone who can access the Internet can be part of the knowledge-access, knowledge-building, information-exchanging culture, regardless of location.

Learning communities do not have to be built through face-to-face interactions. They can be realized using nontraditional electronic communication.

Research suggests that in order for busy teachers to use an asynchronous learning environment they must feel part of a shared vision, have a sense of ownership of some part of the site, and benefit from the shared perspectives of others (Robertson, 2007).&nbsp; Providing the kind of scaffolding that has these features is challenging.&nbsp; Teachers are not typically given the time or the venue to share, discuss, or see examples of pedagogical alternatives for their classroom on any kind of regular basis (Darling-Hammond, 1997).

<p>Although our sample size is rather small, the findings of this study suggest that most participants (community college faculty members, mentor, and intern teachers) recognized the value of blogging as a platform for sharing resources and ideas and reflecting on personal experiences. Several teachers were planning to use blogging with their own students. </p> <p>Blogging seemed to at least indirectly benefit most&nbsp; PLC-MAP teachers in terms of integrating technology into their own teaching practices. </p>