למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

In the conversation over distributed learning environments, it is important to begin by recognizing that the question is not IF our learning environments can be or should be distributed but rather HOW. A professor teaching in a lecture hall back in the halcyon days before wireless connections or mobile phones still taught in a distributed learning environment.

That professor stood connected to an elaborate, non-local, distributed network of knowledge, materials, laborers, institutional polices, and social contracts that governed the relationship between professor and students and provided authority, context, and cultural value to what s/he said. Certainly a course operating in an institutional CMS is connected to a distributed network of technologies, standards, and protocols, as well as institutional budgets, bureaucracies, and practices. Students’ learning experiences are shaped by these distributed networks, and our pedagogies circulate through these networks.

Despite the perceived tech-savvy nature of these Millennials, this context challenges my students. My students are so trained by classrooms where all the connections are pre-made and the only risk is boredom that they are often frustrated when I don’t tell them exactly how to connect the things we are learning, as if the world were just a larger version of the screw-together furniture in their apartments. Of course they know the world is more complex than that; they just don’t expect their classes to reflect that complexity.

תוויות: הרהורים, כתיבה