I got an email this morning calling my attention to the existence of something called the “Emergent Learning Forum.” I don’t know this group and I don’t know what they mean by “emergent learning”; my previous posts on emergence were in response to articles that have appeared in eLearn and the echoes of them that […]
Credit Where Due
I should have pointed out in my last post that Stephen Downes has already made the point that the term “emergence” is being misused in the context of “emergent learning.”
"Emergent Learning" Is an Oxymoron
In the introduction to Steven Johnson’s oft-referenced but seldom understood book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, he describes emergent systems as follows: In the simplest terms, they solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent “executive branch.” They are bottom-up systems, not top-down. […]
Blogging: A world stuck on itself
This article by VC David Hornik does a great job of summing up my own feelings about social software in general and weblogs in particular. Here’s an excerpt: We’re at the very beginning of the evolution of social software. In the coming years, we are all going to learn well more than we already know […]
The Problem with "Emergent Learning:" Informational Cascades
I just submitted an article to eLearn Magazine that starts to get at one of the reasons why I am skeptical about emergent learning as a panacea. I’m not going to give away too many of the surprises here (unless eLearn decides not to publish the article, in which case I will post it here), […]
Great Breakdown of Issues for Higher Ed Distance Learning
Despite its imposingly academic title (“Four Families of Multi-variant Issues in Graduate-level Asynchronous Online Courses”) this article provides an accessible and pragmatic breakdown of problems confronting the development and evaulation of higher ed distance learning programs. There are too many good insights in the article to list here, so I’ll just give one as a […]
Guess What? Teachers Still Count.
Here’s a little gem of a study from the latest issue of Usability News. Basically, it demonstrates that student-centered teaching approaches can go too far, negatively impacting learning outcomes: In this study two different class formats, each with differing instructor roles, were compared. Our hypothesis was that the more student-centered the class format, the more […]