The first week of the class Digital Learning Environments, Networks, Communities was rich with information, delivered to students through Blackboard Collaborate in the form of virtual symposiums. We heard and interacted with a range of speakers from experts and workers in the field of digital learning to students who are near the end of their studies sharing their research projects. Information was given, and a lot of questions were asked and answered.
There were some common themes woven throughout the presentations. Speakers discussed various definitions of “open” and the trends away from the traditional learning model that is solely teacher dictated. There was much talk of the importance of design in e-learning tools, how challenging it can be to make changes within institutions, and aspects of safety and privacy with online presence. There was also dialogue about the hopefulness and expectations for the future through learning and technology. Everyone spoke about which unique path they are currently going down in regards to this broader subject of digital learning.
One tidbit that was surprising to me came from Vivian Forssman from the Centre for Teaching & Educational Technologies at Royal Roads. She pointed out how a lot of e-learning coursework, especially that of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), is centred around high quality embedded video tutorials. Forssman stated that Royal Roads has made a conscious decision not to use that method as a primary means for teaching. I was caught off guard by this since, as a heavy consumer of MOOCs, I fully expected this online Master of Arts in Learning and Technology program to be in that format. She explained that high quality video is costly, and expires too quickly. Instead, faculty and students mainly use various other learning tools and methods, and are also encouraged to create shorter, current, relevant video content to aid in learning. I hadn’t thought of it from the perspective of cost and staying up-to-date in a fast changing industry before, and what she said makes sense to me.
I felt intrigued by Dave Cormier’s example of the 8-year-old who learned how to drive on YouTube and then drove himself to McDonald’s. Cormier attached to that instance a philosophical question of whether we should learn anything, even though we could. I enjoy chewing on that, along with pondering my personal definitions of “free” and “open”, sparked by the dialogue within Cormier’s and several of the other symposium speakers’ presentations.
I agree with Catherine Cronin’s description of “open”, where she insists an individual shouldn’t be categorized as either open or not open. Instead she offers a looser, more fluid and multilevelled classification, where a person has various levels of openness personally and professionally, and operates and posts content from a multifaceted persona based on their many roles in life (eg. parent, worker, activist).
All in all, the virtual symposiums provided many new and fascinating ideas, prompted much discussion, and were a fantastic way to get the LRNT521 ball rolling!