EDTECH at Boise State University

We might as well try to imagine a business man doing business, buying and selling, all by himself, as to conceive it possible to define the activities of an individual in terms of his isolated actions

he social medium neither implants certain desires and ideas directly, nor yet merely establishes certain purely muscular habits of action, like "instinctively" winking or dodging a blow

Making the individual a sharer or partner in the associated activity so that he feels its success as his success, its failure as his failure, is the completing step

first generation of distance education technology was by postal correspondence

second generation, defined by the mass media of television, radio, and film production

interactive technologies: first audio, then text, video, and then web and immersive conferencing

less clear what defines the so-called fourth- and even fifth-generation distance technologies except for a use of intelligent data bases (Taylor, 2002) that create “intelligent flexible learning” or that incorporate Web 2.0 or semantic web technologies

repertoire of options available to DE designers and learners has increase

Many educators pride themselves on being pedagogically (as opposed to technologically) driven in their teaching and learning designs

two being intertwined in a dance: the technology sets the beat and creates the music, while the pedagogy defines the moves

To some extent, our pedagogical processes may themselves be viewed as technologies

none of these three pedagogical generations has disappeared, and we will argue that all three can and should be effectively used to address the full spectrum of learning needs and aspirations of 21st century learners.

Behavioural learning theory begins with notions of learning which are generally defined as new behaviours or changes in behaviours that are acquired as the result of an individual’s response to stimuli

Although learning was still conceived of as an individual process, its study expanded from an exclusive focus on behaviour to changes in knowledge or capacity that are stored and recalled in individual memory.

The locus of control in a CB model is very much the teacher or instructional designer

It is notable that such models gained a foothold in distance education at a time when there were limited technologies available that allowed many-to-many communication. Teleconferencing was perhaps the most successful means available but came with associated costs and complexity that limited its usefulness. The postal service and publication or redistribution of messages was very slow, expensive, and limited in scope for interactivity. Methods that relied on one-to-many and one-to-one communication were really the only sensible options because of the constraints of the surrounding technologies.

Cognitive presence is the means and context through which learners construct and confirm new knowledge

Later developments in cognitive theory have attempted to design learning materials in ways that maximized brain efficiency and effectiveness by attending to the types, ordering, timing, and nature of learning stimulations

Learning was thought of as an individual process, and thus it made little difference if one was reading a book, watching a movie, or interacting with a computer-assisted learning program by oneself or in the company of other learners

reduction of the role and importance of the teacher further fueled resentment by traditional educators against the CB model of distance education

While appropriate when learning objectives are very clear, CB models avoid dealing with the full richness and complexity of humans learning to be, as opposed to learning to do

People are not blank slates but begin with models and knowledge of the world and learn and exist in a social context of great intricacy and depth.

technology became widely used to create opportunities for both synchronous and asynchronous interactions between and among students and teachers

Social-constructivist pedagogy acknowledges the social nature of knowledge and of its creation in the minds of individual learners.

Teachers do not merely transmit knowledge to be passively consumed by learners; rather, each learner constructs means by which new knowledge is both created and integrated with existing knowledge

The locus of control in a social-constructivist system shifts somewhat away from the teacher, who becomes more of a guide than an instructor, but who assumes the critical role of shaping the learning activities and designing the structure in which those activities occur

social-constructivist models only began to gain a foothold in distance education when the technologies of many-to-many communication became widely available, enabled first by email and bulletin boards, and later through the World Wide Web and mobile technologies

Cognitive presence also assumes that learners are actively engaged, and interaction with peers is perhaps the most cost-effective way to support cognitive presence

It remains challenging to apply learning where it can blossom into application and thus demonstrate true understanding

Social interaction is a defining feature of constructivist pedagogies. At a distance, this interaction is always mediated, but nonetheless, it is considered to be a critical component of quality distance education

the educator is a guide, helper, and partner where the content is secondary to the learning process; the source of knowledge lies primarily in experiences

teaching presence in constructivist pedagogical models focuses on guiding and evaluating authentic tasks performed in realistic contexts.

Constructivist distance education pedagogies moved distance learning beyond the narrow type of knowledge transmission that could be encapsulated easily in media through to the use of synchronous and asynchronous, human communications-based learning

learning is the process of building networks of information, contacts, and resources that are applied to real problems. Connectivism was developed in the information age of a networked era (Castells, 1996) and assumes ubiquitous access to networked technologies

It is noteworthy that connectivist models explicitly rely on the ubiquity of networked connections between people, digital artifacts, and content, which would have been inconceivable as forms of distance learning were the World Wide Web not available to mediate the process. Thus, as we have seen in the case of the earlier generations of distance learning, technology has played a major role in determining the potential pedagogies that may be employed.

learners have access to powerful networks and, as importantly, are literate and confident enough to exploit these networks in completing learning tasks

exposing students to networks and providing opportunities for them to gain a sense of self-efficacy in networked-based cognitive skills and the process of developing their own net presence

Connectivist learning is based as much upon production as consumption of educational content

The activities of learners are reflected in their contributions to wikis, Twitter, threaded conferences, Voicethreads, and other network tools. Further, social presence is retained and promoted through the comments, contributions, and insights of students who have previously engaged in the course and that persist as augmentable archives to enrich network interactions for current students

learners and teacher collaborate to create the content of study, and in the process re-create that content for future use by others

stress to teaching presence is the challenge presented by rapidly changing technologies

Attending to a behaviour; remembering it as a possible model or paradigm; and playing out how it may work for them in different situations (rehearsal) are key aspects of observational learning

It makes no sense to talk of knowledge that is decontextualized, abstract or general. New knowledge and learning are properly conceived as being located in communities

Learning does not belong to individual persons, but to the various conversations of which they are a part.

there is a need to explore the extent to which learning (or intelligence) lies in the resources to which people have access

while the individual is significant, psychological analysis should focus on the joint, socially mediated activity in a cultural context

Cognition is about how our brain works or how our mind works

What to teach and how to teach

instruction as anything done for or with a learner or the learner’s environment to help them acquire new knowledge or learn. Some of those things will be very direct and some will be indirect

something one person does to help another person learn

theory is a hypothesis that describes, speculates, or defines a relationship between a set of facts or phenomena through a body of principles, policies, beliefs, or assumptions

more prescriptive. It clearly suggests steps you should follow in trying to support someone while learning. This does not appear to be a theory, but rather a strategy

dividing concepts into categories and hierarchies of ideas

A model is an example, description, or analogy that helps a person understand what is not directly observable

Instructional strategies structure instructional theories for direct application in the learning environment

They provide the instructor with a plan for implementation and are considered more prescriptive, yet flexible enough to accommodate the dynamics of any learning environment.

Creating learning communities is an intentional process of redesigning curriculum and bringing faculty and students together to create more coherent and collaborative learning environments.

-so that students have opportunities for deeper understanding and integration of the material they are learning, and more interaction with one another and their teachers as fellow participants in the learning enterprise”

students more control over their environment with the potential of leading to improved results and more efficient decision making practices.

While not all societies channel sufficient resources into support for educational activities and institutions, all at the very least acknowledge their centrality—and for good reasons

within a few years they can read, write, calculate, and act (at least often) in culturally-appropriate ways

education also serves as a social-sorting mechanism and undoubtedly has enormous impact on the economic fate of the individual.

education equips individuals with the skills and substantive knowledge that allows them to define and to pursue their own goals, and also allows them to participate in the life of their community as full-fledged, autonomous citizens

societal perspective, where the picture changes somewhat

groups depend for their continuing survival on educational processes, as do the larger societies and nation-states of which they are part

The great social importance of education is underscored, too, by the fact that when a society is shaken by a crisis, this often is taken as a sign of educational breakdown; education, and educators, become scapegoats.

education as transmission of knowledge versus education as the fostering of inquiry and reasoning skills that are conducive to the development of autonomy

the question of what this knowledge, and what these skills, ought to be

how learning is possible, and what is it to have learned something—two sets of issues that relate to the question of the capacities and potentialities that are present at birth, and also to the process (and stages) of human development and to what degree this process is flexible and hence can be influenced or manipulated

liberal education and vocational education

personal development or education for citizenship

distinction between educating versus teaching versus training versus indoctrination

education and maintenance of the class structure of society, and the issue of whether different classes or cultural groups can—justly—be given educational programs that differ in content or in aims

whether or not all children have a right to state-provided education

relation between education and social reform, centering upon whether education is essentially conservative, or whether it can be an (or, the) agent of social change

These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, criteria for selecting evidence that has relevance for the problems that they consider central, and the like.

for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education (as Dewey pointed out), and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches, or the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like