Many members have not yet posted much and at least a few are still struggling with the technology. As I indicated in a previous post, there is a method in my madness. The EduBuzzword is “Learner Centered.”

Learner centered is one of those oxymoronic phrases that educators use when they mean one thing but want to make it sound better than it is. There really is such a concept as “Learner Centered” but it can’t really be applied to schools where the teacher (or the school) gets to decide what the learner will learn. There’s something amusingly wrong about any program that declares itself to be learner centered and then requires the students to attend class at a given day and time for a prescribed number of hours.

For this class, we’re incorporating tools which you can use to create a learner centered environment of your own and will, perhaps, provide some insight into how some of these learner-controlled technologies can be put to use in online courses.

They fall into three categories — blogs/gators, community, direct message.

Blogs/Gators: I spend some time on this subject earlier in the week so I won’t belabor the point now. The key issue here is that blogs and aggregators provide a mechanism for reading and writing. You automatically become a participant in the professional discourse on Distance Education. These writings — your postings and your responses to others — provide the fodder for my assessment activities. Most of you have noticed that there are no tests in this course. You’ll have to do a final project to demonstrate mastery, but I don’t believe in tests as an assessment tool. Your blogs demonstrate your performance mastery each and every week. For those of you who maintain that online students must be more self motivated, this is one mechanism where I can help those who maybe aren’t quite so motivated on their own. You must write every week. You must read every week. If you want the best grade, you’ll do it almost every day and not wait until Sunday morning to post the minimum amount.

Community: TappedIn provides a community of educators. It’s kind of like a campus. In many ways, it’s what I’d like to see Blackboard become, but don’t get me started on the short comings of Blackboard. It’s too early in the semester. TappedIn gives us a place to hang out, meet people who aren’t in the class, and find people who may have similar goals and interests. Where the blogosphere provides one kind of community, TappedIn provides another — one that includes chat, repositories, and other features that are under your direct control.

Direct Message: IMs provide us with the ability to “see who else is here” in a real time basis. One of the things that we do in a school is look around at the other people while we’re there. In the typical Bboard course, you can’t see who else may be there with you. IM gives you a window into the shared online space that represents each of us as we participate in course activities. Some people will appear a lot. Some won’t appear at all. It’s a way for us to share, not only with me, but with each other.

Later in the course, we’ll be looking at a basic theory called “Equivalency Theory” that provides the theoretic framework for these tools but for now, we’ll just use them as a given and, once you’ve had a chance to become acclimated, we’ll be discussing their use from a meta-cognitive perspective.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 7:51 am and is filed under Education, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.