e-Learning - The Next Wave

Look beneath the perpetual choppiness of the e-learning seascape and discern deeper currents.

Large-scale e-learning in institutions can be conceptualised as the industrialisation of learning. I think that this is useful and provocative, and in particular will help institutions engage positively with the changing technical, social and economic environment.

We are near a point where the 'first generation of industrial learning' has delivered all it can and we see signs of an emergent 'second generation'.

The first generation was characterised by inflexible ‘Fordism’, the production line; it was driven by institutions, and it managed change from the top. The institutions acted as custodians and gatekeepers to learning and technology, especially for the disadvantaged, and they targeted mass markets, by ‘massification’ and ‘commodification’. Digital divides were simple and soluble.
The first generation was characterised by an emphasis on (the lack of) evidence for policy and for the deployment of technology in learning; increasingly now, technology has become the ubiquitous norm, digital divides are complex and counter-intuitive and the role of evidence is changed (or removed)!

We argue that we are now at the start of a second generation and need to adopt post-Fordist ideas, look at ‘flexible manufacturing' and use ‘mass customisation’ to reach the ‘long-tail’ of learners’ preferences and needs. This generation will be user-driven and institutions must respond to unmanaged pressure from outside. Increasingly, technology happens outside institutions, inside which students now claim to they are forced to 'power down’.

Technology was ‘other’, was a dumb conduit and a dumb container for learning; it merely ‘enhanced’ or ‘supported’ learning. Now technology is socially transformative; technology ‘is us’.

The first generation was Web1.0, the web as centralised broadcaster and students as readers; the second generation must be Web2.0, everyone writers and readers. In terms of ideology, social constructivism was the dominant espoused pedagogy, behaviourism probably the dominant enacted pedagogy. Education, psychology and computing were the foundations of e-learning. The second generation must develop new ideologies, perhaps ‘connectionism’ or ‘navigationism’ for the 'epistemological revolution'; e-learning must engage with sociology.

Mobile Health Care in Cambodia

Cambodia has many health care challenges especially in rural areas. There are of course lots of opportunities to use mobile technologies to help the diagnosis and reporting of illness and to help the health centres and hospitals run more effectively, too many perhaps in terms of identifying priorities.

The university sector in Cambodia also has challenges - many if not most academics were killed or exiled during the Pol Pot era and universities were closed down for quite a few years. There is still a major problem with research capacity and although researchers have technical skills, the capacity to conduct research in the community is more problematic.

IDRC, the Canadian government development research agency, fund projects across south Asia designed to build research capacity and I mentor one such project at the Royal University of Phnom Penh.

They're working on a system that'll probably use 'fronterSMS' to provide support to doctors and patients and will tackle specifically the problems of those rural people who have no English and only speak and write Khmer. Today we talked about strategies for testing the technology and organising user trials.

MirandaMod

Heading off to London to the Institute of Education on Tuesday afternoon to take part in a debate entitled "Mobile learning; handheld learning? What do we mean?" with Norbert Pachler, Graham Brown-Martin and Elizabeth Hartnell-Young. I think the distinction is slightly specious on the face of it but nevertheless could throw up some meaningful differences. My position in part is that neither handheld or mobile learning fully address the transformation of all sorts of things including the economy, employment, communities, identity, knowledge and learning as society increasingly engages with near-universal connectedness and mobility.

Anyone interested?

It's at the WLE Centre, Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, WC1H 0AL. Free events with refreshments. Nearest tube Russell Square.