On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 8:20 AM, Jan Visser <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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
>
Spatial metaphors and language based on them become less and less directly
meaningful these days. "Web as a platform" makes the term "web SITE" a
misnomer. The last few "sites" I made have entities hosted on a dozen
different platforms: videos, aggregator searches, pictures, link
collections, feeds... In what sense is such a collection "a site"?
However, we are probably hard-wired to think and especially to remember in
terms of "space," which comes, as a biologist friend recently explained,
from hunter-gatherer needs to find "minimal paths toward the optimal food."
So people talk about being "together" or "close" when they mean a purely
time-based phenomenon, such as a live webinar! Or people feel like
"neighbors" if they interact ("meet") in several different communities.
Science and practices of networks will probably depend on spatial metaphors
for a long time. The "distance learning" phrase isn't meaningful as a
metaphor for what people aim to accomplish, though.
Cheers,
Maria Droujkova
http://www.naturalmath.com
Make math your own, to make your own math.
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