Monday 19 May 2008

I. Introduction

What does it mean to dance in an online environment? The nature of teaching and learning is according to Gary Zukav (1979), a balance between a systematic, prescriptive, objective, quantifiable, product-oriented view, and a paradigm that can be described as systemic, holistic discovery-oriented, emergent, interactional and experiential. Zukav's paradigm and learning theories provides theoretical background for the instructional strategy and assignments. As the following image indicates, learning theories guide instruction:

In this sense, Downes (1980) in the above graphic also provides a framework for this Module:

Traditional online education Web 1.0 differs greatly from modern approaches. That is,"incorporating blogs for journaling assignments, wikis for creating content incollaborative group projects, podcasts for audio-based assignments, vodcasts for videobased assignments, and RSS feeds for syndication makes use of a few Web 2.0
technologies that can support project-based learning. The creativity and remixing of how the technologies can be used is an exciting new direction for both instructors and students. Creating online courses that center on students constructing their own meaning with hands-on activities may radically change how teaching and learning is designed. Solely delivering an online course with content created by either a publisher or an instructor within the structure of course management software is no longer considered an effective strategy." Students working in learning environments that shift learning to knowledge construction rather than learning by assimilating what the instructor delivers will create courses that resemble a language or conversation rather than a book or manual.

2 comments:

Nancy Armstrong said...

Hi Nelson,

I've never created or commented on a blog before, but I was inspired by the effor that went into the creation of this site...so here is my first posting: Excellent work!

Nancy

Peter said...

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