Hi Maria,
Thanks for that observation. Our language has of course evolved much beyond hunter-gatherer communication and words often acquire different or more evolved meanings. Sometimes also they lose meaning. Particularly the concept 'space' has-presumably thanks to developments in theoretical physics during the early part of the previous century, but I guess also already earlier-acquired meanings that go way beyond our perceptions of the three-dimensional world of tangible objects that surrounds us. I'm not sure how this works out in most people, but for me I've never thought of cyberspace in terms of the hunter-gatherer mentality, not even at the metaphorical level. But then, my background as a theoretical physicist may have biased me towards naturally thinking of space in that wider meaning. Thus, a 'Universal Resource Locator' has no connotation whatsoever for me with locating something in three-dimensional physical space. The same holds true for the term 'Web site.' As said, I don't know if people with a different background think of 'space' metaphorically. They may, as you suggest. If indeed they do, I agree that with increased and prolonged usage such metaphor will probably lose its meaning as the term itself acquires its wider meaning (similar to what happened in the scientific community a century ago). To stay closer to home, the term 'learning space,' as used in current discourse about learning development, I don't think is being interpreted either in terms of physical space by most of its users. But then, I never ask people when they use that phrase what they actually think about. Perhaps I should :-). But it's different for 'distance education', a term coined decades ago by the community interested in exploring alternatives to formal education. That community still held on to the belief that, in order to learn, one needed someone to teach. Only, that teaching was now performed 'at a distance,' whence the term 'distance education.' The most prominent definitions of distance education still include the notion of teaching and distance educators generally don't accept that the learning that occurs when someone grabs a book and explores it in depth falls within the category of distance education. Let's see how this may change in a world where OER become more and more prominent and how it depends on our preconceptions about that particular learning space. 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 2:47 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [WikiEducator] Re: Optimizing Knowledge Transfer 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. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
