Web works

Hi everyone,

Working on the web has a few challenges: you don’t know the gender of the person you are speaking to in a lot of cases – and yesterday I had occasion to react to news as though it were current, when actually it happened a year ago.

Alas we cannot attend the “Future of Education” online conference except as lurkers. However the archive at http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/moodle/ (link to enter the conference archive) remains interesting. Thoughts that come to mind as I read:

1. Context is always important – sometimes a speaker makes known their background, location and area of expertise but sometimes these remain unclear. In international meetings I find folks from the America’s less likely to introduce their location. Where were these people from? To what extent did that constrain their view? Would they say the same things now (with the growth in social networks in the last year)?

2. I found it very interesting the question of accreditation, although it came up within forums, did not attract conversation in a forum set up just for that purpose. The one issue in what new education might look like that no one seems to have a glimmer of an answer for is who and how people who have learned as much as anyone in a class could can be accredited for that learning. Without an answer here people continue to give a good part of their future income back to the university that holds that key.

3. Discussion of change frequently puts people in line with their personal fears on how they will survive. Discussions of the format of schools and the changing roles of students and teachers bring up these fears. As I send to Columbia today for a transcript I realize how many people are employed in education – when people take responsibility for their own education do we fear being put out of work?

4. There is much here worth further investigation. I am caught by catchy titles and interesting new explorations into tools. Also E laminate is offering a web based room for up to three people in conference – what a start! http://216.220.49.222/index.jsp

I’m sure I will be adding more about tools in the next several days, but this should be good for a few ideas to mull over as you all get back to whatever else you have on your doctorate plates!

All the best,

Alana