The internet has transformed the educational landscape, giving students more scope to access information and offering them the opportunity to collaborate in research projects online
In 1995, I took an extracurricular workshop at my university library on the world wide web. The objective was to familiarise attendees with how and why to use this new cyberspace thingy – in the context of education and for general use. I appear to have picked up a thing or two.
Admittedly, I spent most of that afternoon waiting for images of Jarvis Cocker to load on the Pulp fan page, but the ambient learning experience wasn't lost on me; I also learned about browsing, browsers and how to browse through sources that might be academically useful. Remember, this was before Google made sense of web content, before Wikipedia defined everything and before Facebook (and MySpace and Friends Reunited before it) made learning social. Jarvis aside, I sensed change within the hallowed halls of the ivory tower. I was not prepared for just how deep the revolution would be.
In 2003, I returned to academia for my postgraduate degrees and the extent to which the web infiltrated the education landscape in the eight years since I'd first navigated to www.pulp.com became indecently apparent. Almost every article I needed (and many that distracted me from my thesis) was online. There were interactive resources for every subject under the sun. There were virtual worlds where people's avatars attended classes. And instantly I found a thriving community of researchers with similar interests – from students to emeritus professors – who were eager to connect and collaborate. It felt like an extraordinary new world. It continues to, with the ongoing opportunities the web provides.
"The big difference is the move from reliance on print-based to online learning, which offers students much more possibility both to access a range of resources and to work together with other students online," says Dr Mary Lea, chair of the Open University's postgraduate certificate in academic practice, which includes a section on design of learning environments. The OU is familiar with the kind of learning facilitated via distance, but Lea admits the web has opened new avenues for students. "In the past, a distance learning course was written and delivered and because it was in print, did not change much for the next few years," she says. "Now, we are talking much more about design, where there is an integration of a range of media which has implications for the course content, not least in the ways that it is possible to integrate student-generated content."
The new technologies are as varied as the web itself, but the main systems used in classrooms range from virtual learning environments (VLEs) to commercial software such as wikis and social networking sites. The former are intra-network environments, closed to the outside world and often used as a bin for lecture slides, notes and other supplementary materials. The latter are used to encourage classmates to work together. A 2008 report by Childnet International, funded by the now-defunct education technology quango Becta, said that Facebook and similar technologies are valid educational tools. Yet a more recent report by Ofsted found that teachers weren't using these spaces to their full potential. The key lies in the design, it suggested.
Dr Hamish Macleod, who lectures on e-learning at the University of Edinburgh, advises against using the technology solely for disseminating educational content. This model, he argues, leads to assumptions that online courses are less fulfilling than a campus course. "The online mode compels [teachers] to think more carefully about what one is doing and trying to achieve. I like the expression 'the orchestration of experience' as a description of what teachers do. I think this applies equally online and offline."
The web throws an interesting lens on approaches to education in general. "We are often implicitly being asked to compare [e-learning's] effectiveness with the 'gold standard' of the didactic classroom approach. We really have limited evidence about just how effective these traditional approaches are," Dr Macleod maintains. Online resources allow students to explore around subjects and the evidence suggests that kids who have internet access at home do better in exams. But Dr Macleod is cautious about ascribing magical qualities to the web. "I wouldn't say there are any profound changes in the way we should be thinking about theories of learning."
The web has saturated education. The internet established itself in academic institutions and is a vast library of information. It has transformed access to and production of knowledge, both factual and socially constructed. Yet our understanding of learning remains the same. It is still practitioners' responsibility to design spaces that push students away from the distractions of pop bands' websites towards outcomes that make the grade.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/04/internet-education-facebook-schools
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