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Can you think of a memorable learning event when 'the penny dropped'?

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Bowline%2520Knot%2520illustrated.JPG

I have sailed for decades and could usually manage a Bolen knot by counting through the required actions. Then, in a yachting class I had it demonstrated and described as a 'gripping knot'. That's all I've needed ever since to tie this knot in a crisis, underwater, upside down or anywhere else - i.e. I needed to know why not just how. The why is the the learning objective.

Other's are coming to me - like the definition of an isthmus and a peninsula because they were beautifully drawn and coloured in - and was followed by a sharp clip around the ear. I was 6 and my older brother had come into the class and I wanted to give him a kiss.

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Design Museum

E-learning is like a trillion binary threads we splice to the learning rope

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Sunday, 23 Jan 2011, 14:28

I have an idea. I can illustrate it with a knot unpicked for splicing.

Is sums up the relationship between learning and e-learning in no words.

And I thought I was struggling with word count parameters of 2,500 or 5,000 words during H807 'Innovations in E-learning' and H808 'The E-learning Professional.'

This is what I do; I simplify the complex.

Stylus in hand, logged in to ArtPad I do a sketch then  feast my eyes on this.

Images of Knots

45 minutes later I give up the picture search - you cannot shoe-horn an idea into someone else's shoe. You do and the idea my misfire.

I give up on ArtPad because of the licensing agreement which, if I have understood it, does not allow me to copy and paste into a second platform. If there is a way to link I haven't found it. I therefore fall back on Paint which is bundled with the laptop.

My thesis (a picture is a thousand words, even if I only use three to illustrate my point) ... my thesis is that we won't call it e-learning for long. There's always been learning and there always will be, e-learning, like books, is but a strand we've added.

Threads%20of%20learning%20and%20eLearning.JPG

So here we have an expression of learning over the last 100 years. We begin with Edwardian or Victorian teaching, then tease it apart with with telegraphy, telephones, radio and TV, even more so with computer-based learning and Web-based learning: the 'enhancement' complete the threads become re-bound.

For presentation purposes I may now give this out to an illustrator. I'd like to see where this could be taken, keeping it simple, but perhaps expressing the electronic, cabled, wireless and digitised version of e-learning. No binary code though, far from convincing an audience, a cliche bores.

I even have an illustrator in mind.

Neil Gower

P.S. Thread might work better, then I'd be talking about fibres, which sounds right, though I shun puns as I would cliches (though of course in my lazy way I use both all the time.)

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