Emergent Learning:Social Networks and Learning Networks
What social networking - and online learning - shouldn't be
When you spend $50 million on e-learning, you expect results. That's
not what happened in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which purchased Pearson Education's Waterford Early Reading Program four years ago only to find after a study that the software didn't help, and sometimes hindered, student learning. But as a Pearson spokesperson says, "The findings confirmed what we already knew: you have to turn it on to have an impact." According to studies, teachers didn't have enough time for the computer program because they had to cover a reading curriculum introduced by the district a year before.
Bill Williams forwards
this item from last October; it is a description of Scotland's Edinburgh's Interactive University (IU) which, over the past 18 months, "has attracted 75,000 students from more than 23 countries. In sharp contrast to the failure of its English counterpart, UkeU, which had signed up only 900 students when it was scrapped in June, the IU has seen a 75% increase in student numbers over the past year." The differences? The article highlights the personal contact between students and teachers, the ability of students to learn at their own pace, and IU's non-profit structure.
I understand why someone
would say this: "To increase the sustainability of portal projects there is a need to 'work towards establishing common frameworks that will enable applications and services, from different sources, to work together.'" After all, it is precisely that failure that accounts for the indifferent success of community portals, the 'field of dreams' scenario, where you build it, and they do not come. But such an enterprise is perhaps best compared with constructing an artificial language: sure, it would make communication easier if evereyone used the standard - but who speaks Esperanto? The growth of community - and hence, community frameworks - is much more organic than that, a product of multiple simultaneous negotiations to create a network of compatible systems rather than a centralized planning department to create a structure.
