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E is for E-mail

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Wednesday, 7 May 2014, 06:34
  • E-learning

  • EBooks

  • E-tivity

  • Ebbinghaus

  • Ed-Media

  • E-mail

  • Engeström
  • Ethnographic fieldwork

  • Experiential Learning

  • Extreme Learning

  • Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research

  • e-portfolios

  • e-Reader

  • Educational Technology

  • Externalisation

It stared with e-mail. Since then we've got e-learning and more. e-books has stuck, as has the e-reader. The lexicographers will have to decide whether we have adopted e-tivities and e-moderator. It is e-learning, it is never e.learning, but surely elearning is wrong? 

Ebbinghaus matters if you see the opposite of learning to be the problem that educators try to fix - forgetting or unlearning is easily rectified through repetition and application. Various platforms seek to address this. I like what was spaced-ed, and is now the corporate platform Q-stream.

Engeström is an academic who specialises in Activity Theory. Not exclusively e-learning at all, he ventures into management and community communications, but the thinking is valuable if you want to make the complex comprehensible. I wonder if Activity Theory hasn't been overtaken by network theory though, that complexity is the reality and the concept to embrace.

Approaches to research are not exclusive to e-learning either.

E-tivities are activities or learning activities, the pixie dust of learning online. Have people do stuff. I wonder if reading and taking notes, whether online or with a book is not, still, fastest way to gather, process, then integrate, act upon and share knowledge? Reading is reading that transcends the platform. It depends on the subject of course. A law student will read a great deal, a civil engineer may need to be out in the field more. 

Which possibly leaves me with e-mail as the game changer in e-learning.

Already this morning I have exchanged a few e-mails with a fellow student on a MA History course - not at the OU, but at the University of Birmingham where the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is such a mess that we are reduced to or reliant on e-mail. Not all universities are like the OU (though they will have to be one day soon). 

 

 

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