elearning2.0

I never did like the name "Mike's Writes" but it was the first thing that popped into my head when I was building the new KnowNet site, and time is at a premium (I've worked an average of 12 hours every day since New Year's :o(

That name originally sounded amusing to me because there used to be a famous bicycle shop around the corner from my house called "Mike's Bikes" - famous because it had a sign painted by Ed Povey. There's still a lovely old shed from the Mike's Bikes days behind our house. Not missing a local trick, there is a greasy spoon around the other corner called "Mike's Bites". But a local pun is not a good reason to name a weblog.

"c-Learning" appeals to me for a number of reasons - not least its not being "e-Learning".

The "c" is intended as a bit of a pun: it admits that it is in a lower major version than "e" learning will admit to. It also stands for "collaboration" - which to me is the key missing ingredient in online-support for learning.

Extended text for this entry:

I've learned to loathe the conjunction of the letter "e" and the word "learning" over the years. I've been exposed to far too many idiotically unambitious virtual thingamabobs which are excruciatingly boring for the poor students exposed to them but appeal to policy makers and administrators because the concepts they are labelled with map directly and isomorphically onto the physical plant and administrative structures of formal schooling. It's easy to accomplish this: hierarchical structure is trivial, and labels are meaningless unless they describe special behaviours, activities or services 'within' these 'areas'. Drew McDermott coined the tuneful phrase "wishful mnemonic" in the bad old days of good old fashioned AI (Artificial Intelligence; a brand of snake oil that was popular for a while long before this e-learning stuff started gaining market share). He used it to describe and deride the programmer's fallacy of labelling variables and procedures with smart-sounding, active words like 'recognize', thus obscuring their understanding of the trivial behaviours these programs actually perform. I often feel like dusting that old phrase off and adapting it to the wishful labelling of the 'rooms' and 'courses' on offer in the hollow halls of our virtual 'campuses'.

Generally, the more people talk about this "e-Learning" stuff, the more confident I am that they know nothing about the "e" - the woefully wooden technologies they are foisting on hapless students - and care nothing about the "learning".

Oops. Had a bit of an alliterative rant there.

To get to the point, what I do like about this neologism "c-Learning":

If there was one thing I would like to get across to uninformed policymakers about the development and use of internet technologies to support learning, it's that collaborative activity is crucial. Too often I get the impression that these people still believe in receptive learning: push enough content in front of people's eyes and the "knowledge" gets "inside" them. I never knew anyone who could learn in that way. Some people, myself included, learn very effectively when we "read" books, bu that is because we acquired the knack of inventing goals for ourselves to internally develop a coherent structure of personal knowledge that would make systematic sense of the odd things we are reading about. And that we have extensive internalised discussions until we feel we know about an enterprise because we feel we can talk the talk - and knowing something comes down to knowing what people talk about when they talk about it :o)

Most people learn by doing collaborative work towards achieving something, the achievement of which requires knowledge and skill they did not have when they started. That is the kind of activity that I wish we had technology to support online. That is the kind of technology we here at KnowNet knock ourselves out trying to advance.

And so "c-Learning" suits me fine as a name for this weblog. By the way, after I thought of this to-me novel locution, I googled it and found that the University of Melbourne uses it to describe physical collaborative workspaces!