blackboardasaurus

This term (blackboardasaurus) appears in Jon Dron's book 'Control and Constraint in e-learning' which I have recently read for review. I like it because it works on several fronts. For one thing Blackboard looks and feels 'old' compared to any decent Web 2.0 interface. I have sympathy with the view that learning technology would be released from a pall of drabness if blackboardasaurus would do the decent thing and become extinct. Far from promoting innovation, it sinks all too readily to the lowest common denominator of faceless 'document dump'. Indeed, I am slightly miffed that if you propose something genuinely useful, blackboardasaurus is rolled out to stifle such... 'why go to the bother of doing x when you can do y (something approximating to x) in blackboardasaurus'? Result=nothing gets done.

'Virtual classroom benefits'

This is the title of a box in my new PCPlus (May 2008). This is remarkable because it is rather passée - shouldnt the benefits be so apparent by now that we hardly need discuss them? David Malan is behind one Harvard School's podcast project but seems to have his feet on the ground. 'Malan said distance learning is not a major focus for Harvard, although they do offer extension classes... Yet there is nothing quite like actual classroom learning - with a lecture and classmates interacting and discussing the topic' (p82)

ECDL must have questionable worth

ECDL is being used as a badge to say I am 'IT Literate' (whatever that means!). Trouble is, IT knowledge is working knowledge. Typically candidates will study to pass the assessment and then forget next-to-everything. ECDL should take more of a problem-solving approach or those who study for it will feel the badge is rather hollow and their 'IT literacy' will not translate into improved confidence in computer use - possibly the reverse...
Not only that but the 'e-learning' method of learning and testing means that generally only one way of doing something is allowed. This 'closed world' simulation is a far cry from the generally messy way we obtain working knowledge and heuristics.

New literacies and cyberlife

Book review underway and just need to spout a bit...
distributed and procedural knowledge
ICRT - information, communication and relationship technology
Mindsets "forged in cyberspace"

as opposed to propositional knowledge and information delivery
IT - Information technology

Compare this kind of thing with 'ordinary lives' and the concept of digital careers so that even the digital native has to grow up. Does 'new literacy' and its amorphous skillset, that is so dependent on the virtual, actually cross over to the real. I mean, I know that some people seem to 'live' a lot of their life in/on the Internet but what is the essential difference or are there no differences that matter? I remember, "real experiences without real consequences" - although sometimes the cross-over is very real.
I was surprised not to see 'distributed' in the Web2.0 cloud. I looked pretty hard.

books dont crash

This could be a useful title for an article I hope to write but I bet it's somewhere else on the web... hmmmm... lemmie just check...
oh - yep - plenty of them, about 400 - but much less if you fail to spell don't correctly

why is resistance to technology use so interesting to study?

Wertsch (in Mind as action)

An individual's stance toward mediational means [may be] characterized by resistance or even outright rejection.... A focus on resistance and rejection leads one to consider a host of issues that do not arise when one assumes that cultural tools are friendly helpers.

that is quite nice...