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The new literacy studies – David Barton, James Paul Gee, Mary Hamilton, Brian Street

Language pedagogy – Bonnie Norton, Alastair Pennycook, Suresh Canagarajah

Alastair pennycook

“students are in the flow; pedagogy needs to go with the flow”

Students are already familiar with the technology. We need to guide them to make use of those for educational purpose, rather than the social purpose

Mark Prensky – Digital natives vs digital immigrants

• Listening to kids
• New paradigms of learning
• Game-based learning

Tara Brabazon – Hype around e-learning

• Traditional education values (her emphasis is more on transmission mode
• Role of teachers

The digital divide – Mark Warschauer

• Philosophical issues
• CALL
• Digital literacy
• Digital divide (not everyone has access to internet)

Levgotsky - ZPD, scaffolding, social constructivism

Etienne Wenger – community of practice, situated learning, legitimate peripheral participation

Randy Garrison & Terry Anderson – cognitive presence, community of inquiry

Henry Jenkin – participatory culture

Linda Stone – Continuous partial attention

Jimmy Wales – Wikis, Collaboration and community

Lawrence Lessig – Creative commons, Remix culture, Second enclosure movement

Danah Boyd – Social networking

Tana Brabazon – Not in favour of e-learning

(1) On reflection – e-learning

(2) Facebook apps for education

(3) E-learning’s gender factor

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Web 1.0 – informational

Web 2.0 – general use: Social web

Web 3.0 : symentic (intelligent web), geospatial

Normalization – Steven Bach

Representational computing (information source, replaces the teacher) vs relational computing (replaces the classroom) – Andrew Feenberg

Convergence – general use: tools with similar functions; the functionalities have more or less converged to similar capabilities

Collective intelligence – general use:  principle that Wikipedia is using

Social constructivism – Lev Gotsky: Constructivism + Others

ZPD (Zone of Proximity Development) – Lev Gotsky: the zone describing what students can do on their own and what they can with help

Scaffolding – Lev Gotsky: the help or support that u or peers give to learners so that they can reach higher stage in ZPD

Community of practice – Etienne Wenger

Situated learning – Etienne Wenger: learning in context

Legitimate peripheral participation – Etienne Wenger: new comers slowly working their way to the centre of community of practice

Community of inquiry – Randy Garrison and Terry Anderson: based on social constructivism; cognitive presence, social presence, teaching presence

Cognitive presence – Randy garrison & Terry Anderson

Participatory culture – Henry Jenkin

Multiliteracies: audio, visual, multicultural, multiracial, information, etc..

Blended learning – general use: a mixture of face to face and online learning

Weaving – Andrew Feenberg : link the various threads together to work towards the main theme or idea (usually done by the teacher)

Hyperpersonal – Flaming

Flaming – general use: spreading very fast from minor beginnings

Information literacy – general use: ability to find information that you need and be able to evaluate the credibility of the information

Netspeak – David Crystal

Codeswitching – general use: ability to switch between one register of language to another (formal to informal etc)

Remix – general use: fusion of different media (text, audio, video, pics) to work towards a certain idea

Mashup – general use: different media mixed together

Egocentric networks – Dana Boyd: networks centred on a person rather than on topic

Latent ties – Dana Boyd:

Bonding capital vs bridging capital

Context collision – Dana Boyd: professional and social lives collide

Moral panics – general use: making things sound much worse than it actually is

Multitasking – general use: doing more than one thing at one time

Continuous partial attention –  Linda Stone: not paying full attention

Second enclosure movement: attempt of media companies to stop their materials from being used and to extend the copyright law for longer period

Moblogging – general use: mobile blogging

MUVE – general use: Multi-User Virtual Environment

Machinima : machine + cinema, videos made using games or virtual world

There seems to be various definitions on e-learning. Holmes quoted the European e-learning Action Plan definition of e-learning as:

.. the use of new multimedia technologies and the internet to improve the quality of learning by facilitating access to resources and services as well as remote exchanges and collaboration (COM, 2001: 2)

When people hear the word “e-learning”, they first tend to associate it with Internet. For many of them, e-learning is almost synonymous with online learning where learning and contact take place only through the internet-based environment. In my opinion, I would define e-learning simply as making use of technology and Internet to aid in the teaching and learning processes.

Main components in e-learning

The word “technology” should include both software and hardware aspects such as the computer, mobile phone, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and various software multimedia tools. Those tools have evolved into having more sophisticated features and functionalities. In addition, the Internet has also evolved from running on just a dial-up speed of kilobits per second to broadband speed of megabits per second. The presence of more advanced technology tools, together with the faster Internet access, compels most people, especially the current generation, to incorporate the Internet and technology into their daily lives. However, the extent of such assimilation may vary based on the individual’s familiarity, adaptability and perception with technology.

As Prensky has identified, in the digital world, our students – “native speakers of the digital language of the computer, video games and internet (2001)” – feel totally at ease whereas for “those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology (2001)” – termed as “digital immigrants” – will gradually learn to adapt. With the expansion of the digital world, the Internet has become not only just a source of information but also offers an opportunity to become a venue for interaction and collaboration among the users. As such, we should find ways on how to effectively use technology to aid in the learning process of the students. E-learning is the answer.

One of the most common myths about e-learning is that it “is a methodology”. Actually, e-learning is just a technology (E-Language, n.d.) and many educators including Motteram have stated that it is the pedagogy that takes precedence in e-learning. As stated by Gibbs, and Gosper (2006):

… technological and marketplace concerns are driving e-learning, while educators remain in a subordinate position, adapting to the structures they are presented with. These structures tend to invite and accommodate a narrow and restrictive view of education which leads to pedagogically weak designs for learning (pg.47)

we need to first look at how e-learning can be used to achieve the learning outcomes for our students before deciding which e-learning tool to use. In fact, e-learning can be applied in various pedagogies starting from transmission and behaviorist to constructivist and social constructivist models (E-Language, n.d.).

Another common myth about e-learning is that it “is for anyone, anywhere, any time” (E-Language, n.d.). Such myth does not take into consideration about the digital divide that surface within the intended group of students.  Haythornthwaite noted the definition of digital divide as

… the division between those with and without access to computers and the Internet, and their resultant inclusion and exclusion from full participation in the Information Age (pg. 98)

The digital divide is more apparent and risks becoming a barrier to e-learning in developing and impoverished countries as the computer and the Internet – essential instruments in e-learning – are scarce in those places. For such situations, the infrastructure needs to be simplified to just cover the bare minimums and capital non-intensive.

Though e-learning can be carried out any time with its asynchronous nature, in order for the students to get the most out of e-learning, there must be active online engagement through interactive discussions and collaboration among the students themselves. The teacher needs to facilitate the discussions well by “weaving” – a term that Andrew Feenberg came up – the ideas of students together. The teacher is no longer just the evaluator of what is going on in the learning environment. He/she also becomes the connector within the students’ learning process.

Uses of e-learning

E-learning can be used mainly to provide professional trainings in corporations and organizations and also for the purpose of education in schools and higher learning institutes. In the education arena, e-learning has been used in teaching various subject disciplines though the nature of some of them such as language, and literature seems to allow a higher adoptability of e-learning than certain subject disciplines such as engineering.

Many resources point to distance-learning, where face-to-face interaction between educators and students was not possible, as being the first to adopt e-learning. Nowadays, many educators use e-learning as supplementary learning environment to the face-to-face learning environment that they have with the students in their classes; thus leading to the term of “blended learning”.

My first serious encounter with e-learning occurred during my MEd course. Only after having lessons there, I realised the differences between web1.0 and web2.0 tools and the fact that all those things that I was familiar with, such as blogs, podcasts, etc, can be used for educational purpose. Out of all those e-learning tools, I was only aware of discussion boards being used in educational settings. I thought that whenever someone mentions wiki, it is synonymous to wikipedia. So when my e-learning lecturer showed us how blogs, podcasts and an array of other web2.0 tools are being used to help in delivering lessons, I was really excited.

For example, I knew about twitter before but never knew about how I can find information using it and how people can discuss or brainstorm ideas through it (well, I am still skeptical about the effectiveness of people building ideas together through twitter. More on that later). Over the many months, I have begun to see how useful Twitter is for me to keep in touch with the latest news in the areas that I am interested in. By following my e-learning lecturer’s twitter account, I am now able to keep abreast of many happenings related to e-learning as well as other things that happen to be of interest to him (which I also happen to find interesting).

Then, there was this second life. Before my e-learning class, I thought second life is for those people who are not really satisfied with what they have in reality and hence, venture into the virtual world to fulfill their secret desires. Well, that may be true for some people. But later I realised that I could also use second life for another beneficial purpose such as to go to places like museums in far away countries to see paintings at close proximity and to attend virtual seminars with all the rest of the people from all over the world, etc. How exciting it was! But alas, the novelty on second life wore off after a while as my computer wasn’t really equipped to handle the kind of processing power required to use it and my patience wore off from having to spend a considerable amount of time to get myself familiar with it. One thing for sure is that, I will be back again to try my hand at second life when my schedule permits.

Then, there was this famous facebook which I thought was something I would never need to use. After all, I am pretty much connected with my friends in the real world. Why would I need another account in the virtual world to do so? How wrong I was! After my e-learning lecturer showed us how the information sharing, how reaching out to many people and being connected with many people can be made easy through facebook, I got inspired and quickly opened an account. It has been over half a year and I am now one of its active users, though definitely and certainly not to the extent of addiction. Through facebook, I have found many childhood friends from primary school, secondary school, college, etc. Although facebook has not really enhanced my frequency of correspondences with them, it has helped me to at least catch up on what they have been doing in their lives. Through facebook, I am also able to share many things with my friends as well as my students on informational stuff,  fun and interesting stuff, thought-provoking stuff, etc.

After my fascination with twitter, facebook, second life and other various web2.0 tools settled down, it then dawned upon me that I am so interested in e-learning and the fact that it can be used to enhance the learning experience for the students.

So, I have decided to open this blog to track my journey to go deeper into e-learning. Without a doubt, this is the path that I have chosen to walk upon for many years to come.