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An Overview of Online Learning: Preface
About this Overview

This Overview introduces you to online learning, and provides you with an overview of the key issues you need to consider when working with online learning. Specifically, this Overview:
Describes what online learning is and identifies its major uses
Identifies the four major types of online learning
Provides an overview of the technology needed to make online learning happen.

Lists the project issues–that is, management and learning issues–that need to be addressed when developing materials for online learning

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Foolish Luddism?

Preview of an e-learning book

Beware of too much technology

Everything in moderation, nothing in excess the ancient Greeks taught us. E-learning is one of those areas where we might get excessive. An example of excessive use of the technology is seen in some courses where participants need to spend hours downloading files or reading documents online. In some courses students waste time working in groups. In other courses students are expected to read long documents on a computer monitor. It would be better to send them paper versions of the documents. Placing huge documents on CD-ROM, or DVD sounds like a great idea, but who reads them? Video conferencing appeals to the techie in us, but is it more effective than video tapes or even audio tapes? Is video conferencing worth the additional cost and the effort? You can get too much of a good thing. E-learning does not need to be 100% pure. It may be appropriate to combine leader-led courses, paper-based documents, video tapes and audio tapes with e-learning instructional materials.

One of the dangers of online learning is that we will try to do too much with new technology. We need to guard against replacing existing, valid approaches with new, less-effective ones.

Later: Thursday, April 8, 2010

They have gone, but will be here forever: http://web.archive.org/web/20020205132359/http://www.e-learninghub.com/effective.html

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elearningpost

“Daily Links to Corporate Learning, Community Building, Instructional Design, Knowledge Management, Personalization and more”

This is a great blog – have added permanent link on the left.

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2000:November:Feature:Micromedia

Two recent developments are of special interest. Blogger (www.blogger.com), perhaps the premiere weblog developer, has teamed up with Moreover.com to facilitate the linking and annotation of mainstream news articles. Called NewsBlogger (www.newsblogger.com), itÂ’s a potent form of online journalism that will serve to define and delimit new market segments. Also, Cisco just implemented Blogger enterprise-wide. Imagine the avalanche of intellectual capital such a move could precipitate. The Internet has always demanded that business read between the lines. Weblogs raise the bar. Now the challenge is to read between the sites.

Christopher Locke is the co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a New York Times bestseller. Check out the weblogs of his creation at personalization.com (www.personalization.com/blogger) and The EGR weblog (rated R at best) (www.rageboy.com/blogger.html).

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Is The Virtual Community A Myth?

Slashdot | Is The Virtual Community A Myth?

Berkeley scholar Joseph Lockard (a doctoral candidate in English Literature) claims the idea of the virtual community is a Ponzi scheme, promoted by benighted utopians and elitists who equate access to the Net and the Web with social and democratic enlightenment. This myth has been virtually unchallenged for years, he says, and in a provocative and interesting essay called Progressive Politics, Electronic Individualism, and the Myth of Virtual Community, Lockard claims that it’s nothing more than a bunch of hooey.

This item is posted by Jon Katz and his commentary concludes:

Online people do make powerful connections and the virtual realm does permit us to share information (including software), research and commerce and and encounter all sorts of people in all kinds of places — something that has never been possible before. But when the dust settles, and if the history of technology offers any clues, people will always hang out with their friends, get drunk. They’ll still be logging off their computers to have sex, get married, fight with their parents, send their kids off to school and go to the movies, and seek out the company of human beings to meet human needs. The best virtual communities have always complimented that need, not supplanted it.

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“HMMM…WHERE’S THAT SMOKE COMING FROM?”
Writing, Play and Performance on Internet Relay Chat

Abstract

Digital writing is strikingly playful. This playfulness flourishes particularly in synchronous chat modes on the Internet. This paper is a study of writing, play and performance on IRC (Internet Relay Chat). We analyze a “virtual party” on IRC, whose highlight was a typed simulation of smoking marihuana. Three interrelated, yet analytically distinct types of play are discussed: 1) play with identity; 2) play with frames of interaction; and 3) play with typographic symbols. We adopt a qualitative, textual, and micro-sociolinguistic approach, drawing on work in discourse analysis, the study of orality and literacy, and the anthropology of play and performance. In all play there is reduced accountability for action. In the material world, masks and costumes at carnival time liberate participants; here, the ephemeral, non-material medium, the typed text, and the use of nicknames provide the mask. Although the improvisation analyzed here is typed and occurs between geographically dispersed strangers, it has fascinating affinities with “live” interactional forms such as jazz, charades, and carnivals.

PLAYFULNESS IN COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is strikingly playful. Millions of people are playing with their computer keyboards in ways they probably never anticipated, even performing feats of virtuosity with such humble materials as commas, colons, and backslashes. Not only hackers, computer “addicts,” adolescents and children, but even2

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