Personal Blogs

When it comes to learning, everything matters - epecially the tips of your toes.
'Human learning is the combination of processes throughout a lifetime whereby the whole person - body (genetic, physical and biological) and mind (knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, emotions, beliefs and senses) - experiences social situations, the perceived content of which is then transformed cognitively, emotively or practically (or through any combination) and integrated into the individual person's biography resulting in a continually changing (or more experienced) person'. Knud Illiris (2009:24)
In 1980 I worked the winter season in a Hotel in the French Alps. It was a 13 hour working day that started at 6.00am and included three hours off over lunch - 12h00 to 15h00. That's when I went skiing - in all weather. That season, like this, had an abundance of 'weather' with more snow than even Val d'Isere could cope with. An avalanche took out an entire mountain restaurant ... or rather burried them. They were fine and re-opened after a few weeks. Towards the end of the season I would shot up the slopes, in my M&S suit, with a plasticated boiler-suit like thing over it and skied the same run maybe 11 or 12 times before returning to the hotel and an afternoon/evening of carrying bags, digging cars out, taking trays of food, cleaning and translating French to English for the Hotel Manager. I had a Sony Walkman cassette player. I played Pink Floyd 'The Wall' and skied to 'The Wall'.
33 years on, using the same skis if I want, the music on an iPhone, I manage three to five turns at a time ... rest ... three to five more turns ... rest ... three to five turns and take a suck on my Ventolin inhaler .... and so on.
And what comes to mind?
'The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire' Gibbon and Alexis de Tocqueville 'L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution' - both required reading before I started my undergraduate year of History later in 1981.
These are the games the brains plays on you. I can now of course recall Madame Raymond, the Hotel Manger, The Sofitel, Val d'Isere and Christian, the waiter who taught me to ski ... and the word for dust 'poussiere'.
And while up here 33 years later I have so far got through three books:
'The A to Z of Learning Theory' (2002), David Leonard; 'Contemporary Perspectives in E-learning Research' eds. Grainne Conole and Martin Oliver and 'Contemporary Theories of Learning' edited by Knud Illeris (2009) ... from which I drew the above quote. The first covers some 150 learning theories - by the time you've finished it you may conclude that there is life and learning while death brings it to the end. As Illiris states, everything counts. The second is one of those academic compillations of papers. The title is disengenious as I could not find in ONE single paper (chapter) any attempts to give a perspective on e-learning research, rather these are papers on e-learning. Period. While the Knud Illiris edited book does the business with some great chapters from him, from Etienne Wenger and Yrjo Engestrom. So one is the K-Tel compilation from Woolworths, while the latter is 'Now E-Learning'.
As it is still snowing I may have to download another book.