Cooper-Taylor Training

Interesting article by Martin Ebner and Mandy Schiefner which I found by doing a Twitter search for eLearning. The nub of the article is that the “e” in eLearning will die as this form of learning becomes common place. Now I agree with the thrust of the article, and many of us in the eLearning field have commented on the fact that we didn’t talk about “overhead transparency learning” or “video learning”, so why do we continue to talk about eLearning? There will, I am sure, come a day when we stop talking about eLearning and just talk about learning. Or, heaven help us, along will come αLearning and θLearning and λLearning (the latter tailored for gay students perhaps). What I personally hope is that we will start concentrating on good pedagogy  and how that transfers across media.

One bit where I didn’t agree with Martin and Mandy is where they talk about Prensky’s “digital natives”. At the recent DEANZ 2008 conference, one of the key note speakers, Michael Barbour, raised this in his presentation. Prensky’s book is not based on rigorous research, so why are academics quoting it? In Prensky’s world I’m not a  digital native (I’m a baby boomer, if you want labels) but I know my skills are far superior to most supposed digital natives. My observations (again not research) point to a user who tries most technology without trepidation, but only learns the bits they need. Surface learners if you will. Or WIIFM (what’s in it for me).

That said the article is well worth a read. And I must put this eLearning Twitter Search into my RSS reader. After all 1st go brought me something useful