This section really needs updating as it only deals with research up to 2004. There’s a bit of my own research that I possibly should mention (see Research), plus a plethora of new forms of media interaction for social learning. Revisiting my thesis has helped to focus what my work entails, what I am – a social learning theorist (definitely NOT a social media guru).
I will intersperse this with some comments from experience and a small bit of recent research. Read more of Previous Research
This section of my thesis started to elaborate some of the issues of working online via a computer. I have deleted a section, indicated below, because I’m not convinced it was completely right. Nevertheless, the conceptualisation of interaction with a computer is here. I should stress at this point, that I view interaction as a term to be between people, unless otherwise noted. Later in the thesis, I elaborate this. Read more of Online learning environments
Part of the set up to my thesis was establishing the shift towards Internet enabled education and the shifts toward using technology. The rapid growth of connections has had a huge impact on the ways we interact with one another. Also, as noted below, broadband access was not commonly available while I was doing my research. This needs to be accounted for within some of my assumptions. But the rapidity with which these changes have occurred and the effects of them are telling. Read more of How the Internet became central to education
In an effort to review my research focus, and to update what I know, I’m blogging my thesis. It’s more a reblogging exercise, if you think of the thesis as a huge blog, which it’s not. But the things I learnt while doing it are very important and in the 5 years since its completion, I’ve barely touched it. In some ways, I think it has become more important because we are much more engaged in many more forms of interaction. I collected my data nearly a decade ago and my concern was that we weren’t really sure what learners were doing while engaged in ‘online learning’. I’m still not convinced that ‘online’ is different from face-to-face but I’m also not convinced that it’s the same. There are different affordances available through each, and how this plays out in learning is still not well understood. There’s an insidious pedagogy (Lane, 2009) implied with their use, but that is also true of face-to-face. I’ll come to that later.
This is the beginning of my thesis – the background, the set-up. I don’t think there is much changed since I wrote this, but there is a broadening of issues. Read more of Learning and interactions
Tags: learning
I keep coming back to the issue of ‘filtering’ the internet that is most concerning to me. I don’t care so much about morals – everyone has a different set; and I’m not that convinced of the technology – it will improve or not as it always does. What concerns me most is the effect that a filtered feed from all sources will have on us as a society and as individuals within that society.
It’s not so much that Big Brother is watching us 1984-style, it’s that we won’t be able to think our way clear on any issue. It’s not that we will have ‘thoughtcrimes’, it’s that we won’t have thoughts. Our perceptions, our knowledge, our reality will be reduced to whatever it is that we can access. Mindless facebooking, linking stuff, grabbing stuff, accumulating links[1]. It’s like the EPIC thing, the Evolving Personalised Information Construct.
But, where EPIC2014 hints at the commercialisation of the process, the current filtering proposals don’t even give us the option of anything evolving. Anything not appropriate will be filtered, we won’t have any choice.
We’re already seeing people mindlessly buying stuff on the internet, witness the Beijing Ticketing scam[2]. It’s that idea of ‘functional literacy’ in a hyperconnected world. People believe what they want to believe, they read what they want to read. But sometimes there is no thought behind the reading. There is no way for them to fully participate in the business of living. Hence we have people losing thousands of dollars to scammers, and not just any people, but even the tech savvy[3].
The idea that anything bad for us should be filtered, that children should be protected from accidentally realising that maybe, just maybe, their parents have sex, is quite disconcerting. Or is that the point of the filters – children shouldn’t even think that sex is normal[4].
I wonder at what will become of our ability to think when we have a clean feed. Here is your box, think inside it. Outside is bad, very bad.
Perhaps there is a better way.
Tags: censorship, education, learning, nocleanfeed
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