Description

2020 Special Focus - There is No scale : Distance and Access in the Era of Distributed Learning.

First we called it ‘computers in education’. Then it was the World Wide Web. Then it was the reincarnation the Internet in the form Web 2.0 and social media. For a long time, we educators have lived with enthusiastic talk about the implications of technology in learning. Sometimes the talk has been plausible. At other times the results of using technology in learning have been disappointing.

For all the hyperbole, education is in many sites and many ways still relatively unchanged—the relations of teachers to students, students to each other and students to knowledge—and this is the case even when technology is used. For instance, if the print textbook becomes an e-book, do the social relations of knowledge and learning actually change? If the pen-and-paper test is mechanized, does this change our assessment systems?

Technology, in other words, can and often does reproduce and reinforce traditional, didactic relationships of learning. However, today’s information and communications technologies also offer affordances which in many ways we have barely yet explored. These possibilities we call a ‘new learning’, and ‘transformative pedagogy’.

How then, can we create and use technologies that push the boundaries of the learning experience, engage students more deeply and produce learning outcomes that live up to the high expectations of citizens, governments and workplaces in the twenty-first century? For this reason, in this research network, we want to focus not just on e-learning, but the pedagogical innovations that we hope e-learning environments might support. In this agenda, the ideas and practices of ‘ubiquitous learning’ suggest a wide range of possibilities.