I can't agree more and have indeed been engaging quite consistently in the same practice that you mention. At the time I was in charge of Learning Without Frontiers at UNESCO (during the 1990s) my team members and I also made it a point not to mention the word 'education' and any words with the same root, but emphasize 'learning' instead. One must be careful, though. I often see references now to 'distance learning' instead of 'distance education' as if the simple substitution of a word would change the practice. In fact, 'distance learning' is a misnomer. You don't learn at a distance. You learn where you are as part of the network within which you partake and which serves you as an environment for the sharing of learning experiences. 'Distance education' is the more proper term, but it does reflect the underlying assumptions of its practice, which are not too remote, despite claims to the contrary, from those conditioning traditional f2f schooling models. Much work is still needed to bring about real change.
Jan --- Jan Visser, Ph.D. President & Sr. Researcher, Learning Development Institute _____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Maria Droujkova Sent: Sunday, September 06, 2009 1:35 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [WikiEducator] Re: Optimizing Knowledge Transfer On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 6:53 AM, Jan Visser <[email protected]> wrote: This makes much sense to me, Maria, and I agree that, while attention to familiarity with wiki syntax is an important entry point for the WE platform, it is no more than just that. I would love to see increased interest emerge in issues pertaining to questions about how we learn and how we help other people learn, including through teaching, when it can't be avoided, but preferably through a wider variety of means and contexts. Jan As an exercise, I spent five years never using the word "teaching" other than quoting literature. I highly recommend the exercise, which also works in shorter stretches of time, for anyone involved in helping others make sense of the world, create and join communities, or otherwise develop. Wiki and Ning are two platforms most suitable for community learning projects at the moment. They are open enough to support various community practices, and (with some platforms) easy to use with various embeddable social objects from other sites, in the "web as a platform" approach. The notion of a social object is extremely important for this conversation, yet almost nobody knows what it even is... Cheers, Maria Droujkova Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
