Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Formal learning too important to be left to...

Found this quote from Robin Goodfellow and had to share but even the highlighted bit is too long for twitter so, while I'm here... you get the context a bit too - Thanks Robin!
By the time the Internet, in the form of the World Wide Web, burst on the educational scene in the 1990s, however, I had discovered enough about distance education to realize that formal learning is too complex and too important for learners to be entrusted to engagement with materials or technologies, however ingeniously they may be designed. I had also begun to realize that this was not a view necessarily shared by governmental and corporate drivers of educational policy servicing the ‘knowledge economy’, and that debates were emerging, among students and between students and teachers on the courses I worked on, and among my teaching, research and development colleagues, over the proper role of electronically mediated practices in the shaping of the learning experience. My own research began to focus on an examination of the institutional realities behind pedagogical practices which were being constructed as ‘innovatlve’ and transformational’ by the e-learning community of which I was part, but which seemed to me to be as likely to involve their participants in struggles over status and voice almost as intense as those I had experienced as a secondary school teacher (Goodfellow 2001, 2004b, 2006; Goodfellow et al. 2001).
This is from the biographical sketch on page 3

Goodfellow, Robin, and Mary R. Lea 2007 Challenging E-Learning in the University: A Literacies Perspective. Berkshire: McGraw-Hill