Forks in the Road/Nodes in the Web toward Digital LearningPosted on October 6, 2014 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorI usually don’t see the fork in the road at the time I take it. It’s only looking back that I can say, “Huh. Made a choice there.” Or, occasionally, “Huh. Made a meaningful choice there.”As 2008 slid into 2009, a recent addition to the rank of PhDs and already-long-time member of the adjunct-faculty class, I read a blog post–I suppose for me in that year it must have been a blog post, rather than a Tweet or a Facebook status update–by Dr. A.K.M. “Akma” Adam, recommending his readers’ attention to a *then* recent digital learning video by Michael Wesch. It was “A Portal to Media Literacy” (2008), following upon Wesch’s “The Machine is Us/ing Us” (2007). Both presentations concern learning and the digitization of text…
Resisting Disembodiment – Distributed Learning is Not Distance EducationPosted on December 27, 2013 by Ryan TormaWhen I first started working in online seminary education, my boss explained to me, ‘We don’t do distance education, we do distributed learning.’ Working with her and many other wise leaders, I came to understand what they meant. Distance education implies a learned center from which education radiates out. Online learning technologies allow education to be delivered to people who are distant from that center, but they are distant nonetheless.Distributed learning is something different….