Month: September 2018

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Educators and the Pedagogy of Abundance

For this assignment, we were asked partner in pairs and to identify a topic that we were both currently unfamiliar with and would like to know more about. The topic we chose was Bitcoin. Being that there’s quite a bit of hype around the subject, the material available was of course extensive. We did find it surprising that scholarly journal articles do exist on this topic. We did not realize that this cryptocurrency had been around since 2008. In terms of Bitcoin, we were able to find many articles through Google Scholar regarding the topic. In other words, it was a situation of “abundance” as Weller (2011) has identified.

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The Relative Strengths of Cognitivism and Constructivism

 

In my field of work, which is web development, the pace of change is quick. Whatever foundational degree anyone may have gained prior to entering the field, would provide only an introduction to the subject. Given the speed of change, it is necessary that programmers remain in a constant state of learning. An additional consequence of this pace of change is the challenge that besets formal educational institutions, who cannot keep pace (Committee on the Growth of Computer Science Undergraduate Enrolments, 2018). As a result, it tends to be necessary for developers to conduct their own learning in a self-directed manner, and often from informal sources (The Conference Board of Canada, 2018). Continue reading “The Relative Strengths of Cognitivism and Constructivism”

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History of Adobe Captivate

https://youtu.be/laC6Brkfmy4

Weller (2014) illustrated the recent history of educational technology by listing the different educational technology, theory, or concept for each year between 1998 through 2018. What’s telling is that Weller did not include e-learning content authoring tools. Despite the grand expectations about their potential, the omission seams to be indicative of a failure, to consider the fundamental affordances of computers. Continue reading “History of Adobe Captivate”

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Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: the slow transformation of educational technology and what we can learn from it

Reiser wrote a two-part article in 2001 which summarized the history of Instructional Design and Technology and drew some important conclusions. According to Reiser, of the many lessons we can learn from his review, likely the most important is that there has been a consistent tendency of over-estimate the degree of impact that new technologies would have (Reiser, 2001, p. 61). Reiser (2001a) was cognizant of the fact that he was writing at a time when computers and the Internet were just beginning to make their influence in education. Reiser believed these technologies would likely have a greater impact that those that preceded them. However, given the lesson that he identified, he predicted that, “such changes, both in schools and in other instructional settings, are likely to come about more slowly and be less extensive than most media enthusiasts currently predict” (p. 62). Continue reading “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: the slow transformation of educational technology and what we can learn from it”

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Online Learning is New, Distance Education is Not

Effectively, the basis of the innovation in the use of computers in education has been to serve two separate purposes: computers provide new opportunities as learning aids; but, computers are also used to assist in distance education, whose existence long predated their advent. One of the earliest attempts took place between the early eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, where courses in short hand were offered by correspondence (Börje, 2005; Moore & Kearsley, 2005). The University of London was the first university to offer distance learning degrees in 1858 (Sheldon, et al., 1998). Continue reading “Online Learning is New, Distance Education is Not”

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The Folly of Crowds: Cyber-Utopianism and Education Technology

Without a doubt, new digital technologies are affording us with important possibilities for transforming the ways we interact and communicate (Dickel & Schrape, 2017, p. 52). However, the field of educational technology, argues Selwyn (2011), is marked by technological utopianism which at times has exaggerated that potential (p. 713). As such, the responsibility of the educational technologist has come to seen to be to “harness the power of technology” (Selwyn, 2011, p. 713). Proponents see digital technologies as means for bringing about a “new social order,” pursuing the improvement of education according to social constructivism, by supporting various forms of informal student-centered learning (Selwyn, 2011, p. 713). This positivist idealism is of course driven by a noble desire to improve education. However, argues Selwyn, this positivism has become “hegemonic”, leading scholars to become evangelical about the prospects of the technology, and ultimately unwilling to consider more critical perspectives, and thus finally bringing into question credibility of the field as an area of serious academic study (p. 713).

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