elearnspace

What is this learning act of which you speak? Where does it happen? When does it happen? If it's that minor epiphany, the "Ah-ha!" moment, then it has always been in the hands of the learner, has it not? Stated a bit more precisely, it has always also taken place somewhere in the individual neural network, at a moment when logic, intuition and motivation conspired to make it stand out from the scrolling matrix as something worthy of long-term storage and recall.

I teach at a community college, and am myself a product of the community college system. I took that university thing as far as it would go, too, but it was the first two years at a community college that made me a learner. And it was the teachers I encountered there that made the difference, not the content that I might, presumably, have assmilated on my own. Logic must be learned, intuition must be nurtured, and the motivation to do anything beyond preserving oneself and procreating, is a product of social interaction. We do one helluva lot more than certify! We provide connections to current subtotals of accumulated knowledge and wisdom. We provide a safe environment for testing assumptions and assertions--those of others, and our own. We introduce doubt into a world that would otherwise go without saying.

I've played around with the concepts of centre and periphery for more than twenty years. The relationship is archetypal and will no doubt continue to fascinate. But modern learners aren't the downtrodden masses, yearning to learn free. Post-structuralists and other disaffected Marxists have nothing to teach us about centre and periphery in the context of learning communities.

I teach new media and Web technologies, but with just a little shift in perspective, I recognize that instant messaging is essentially gossip, and the lion's share of blogs little more than narcissistic streams of consciousness. The mere fact that pod- and vodcasts don't use push-technology to infiltrate our living spaces is only quantitatively different than having 200 cable channels to choose from.

These so-called "very different ways of experencing news and entertainment" are not necessarily grounds for celebration. The potential of these new technologies holds enormous promise, I'll grant you, but there is little measurable evidence that they represent a paradigm-shift in the way students learn. We have simply hyped the future to the point where we actually think we remember it.

Can't wait for my teacher to post his lessons on MyTube so everyone will know how insane he is :)

I totally agree with you George. Present and near future technologies will (hopefully) change they we teach and enhance students learning. It is frustrating trying to get some people to see the potential. I'm glad you can.