I have been thinking about the concept of transforming learning with technology rather than just transferring the old pedagogy onto the web and have come up with the following list so far:
| Transfer | Transform |
| Inflexible: Teacher centered | Flexible: Student centered |
| Fixed module contract: tutor decides on the structure of the module and the assessment criteria | Student negotiation: Tutor and students negotiate the structure of the module and the assessment criteria |
| Notes: tutors provide notes and other inputs using MSword and Powerpoint | Evaluation and selection of learning materials: students are guided towards sources of information and make their own decisions about which ones to use, supported by sets of negotiated assessment criteria. |
| Discussion areas: tutors set up closed discussion areas on a VLE such as WebCT | blogs [ aggregation via RSS ]: each student has their own blog where they can develop their own voice. |
| Presentation areas: set up and controlled by the tutor | wikis: the group has a wiki where thay can produce a consensus about different materials |
| Fixed Syllabus: all students cove rthe same material which is determined by the tutor. | Open syllabus - student selected: students decide on the content they will learn after negotiation with the tutor to help ensure that it meets the learning outcomes of the module. This will allow for differing experience and previous knowledge. |
| Fixed activities: All students do the same things to achieve the learning outcomes | Negotiated activities: Extend student’s ideas to achieve the learning outcomes: The open syllabus idea is extended to the activities that the student undertakes. |
At a recent SEDA conference Lewis Elton concluded that what we need is "not to do things better but to do better things" and on a recent blog (can’t remember which one at the moment) there was a comment about using IT saying "what is needed is not transfer but transformation".
Both of these ideas suggest that the use of e-learning in itself will not improve learning and if we continue to use IT to replicate "old style methodology" then the concepts of e-learning 2.0 will go the suffer the same fate as that of e-learning 1.0. It will fail to produce the transformation of learning that we all want. I recently ran a workshop at a SEDA conference about whether the use of IT can transform (improve) our pedagogy.
I am now beginning to think that unless using IT does make us challenge our pedagogy and therefore hopefully improve student learning then there is no point in doing it. At the moment I am reading an article by Ulises Mejias about the use of social software. [local copy] In it he raises some of the issues that I have also noted. He is also intending to use a similar blog/wiki/RSS set up to the one I intend to use for my COMP4040 module next semester. However I must first sort out the issues about community building.