lrNING 21

In response, we need to find a way to reconceptualize many twentieth-century education models, and at the same time reinforce learning outside of formal schooling. There may be powerful ways to blur the distinction between formal learning and informal where both turn on the social life of learning.

So to me, that’s why I find this so exciting, is that in a curious way the explosion of digital technology still increasing this exponential path is driving change, change, change ever faster, which is creating a tremendous problem for the old ways of learning and teaching. But the same thing that’s driving this challenge we have is also providing us the tools and mechanisms to attack this problem in fundamentally new ways.

How might the slow-to-change culture of education adapt elements inherent in a fast-paced technological world? When is it most appropriate to do so?

As a result, individual educators spend heroic amounts of time on planning and preparation, but with enormous duplication of effort and no economies of scale. Apart from the lack of efficiency in preparation, educational quality also suffers: While some educators regularly create outstanding learning experiences for their students, some do not. How could the best teaching processes be shared among the widest number of educators

In these projects, the power of the Internet is used to overcome barriers to access by serving as a medium for freely distributing content. Making existing content available in this way is based on the revolutionary idea that education and discovery are best advanced when knowledge is shared openly.

Because teaching and learning are so hard to see and know, they are even harder to systematically analyze and improve. One reason why policymakers have turned their attention to the clamor and cry for assessment and accountability is higher education’s “black box” of classroom excellence and student success. If the so-called “best practices” of teaching and learning could be identified and articulated beyond local environs, shared in a transparent and transferable mode with an assurance of accomplishment at the end of the day, then educators the world over might be convinced to embrace change.

The failure is harder to put into words. It could be described as our lack of progress on sharing “pedagogical know-how” among educators

but we have not captured the teaching processes that expert educators use to bring learning alive in their e-learning courses

We think of this genre as embracing the ideals of scholarship and the practices of our contemporary, digital-participatory culture.

Our knowledge and understanding of “technology-enhanced learning” will accelerate faster in a teaching community that acts like a learning system--one that makes knowledge of what it takes to learn explicit, adapts it, tests it, refines practice, reflects, rearticulates, and shares that new knowledge