New Experiments in e-Learning

After all the inevitable turmoil of applications and enrolment for the new academic year, I finally got down to some regular classes. I met with my new first year level 3 students and during the session introduced them to the vle. I demonstrated how we would be using the various resources that it has available, and wound up with an invitation for them to contribute to their own learning resources for the Website Production module by contributing to an online Glossary. At the end of the class I suggested that they might like to join my Facebook; so much faster communication than college email for some reason!. Not a bad start for a first class of the term, but that’s not what this post is really about. The other day I came across a video from the Ted talk series, where Sugata Mitra was presenting the results from new experiments in self-teaching. The video has really caused me to stop and think around the whole idea of collaborative eLearning and the problem we are possibly inflicting upon ourselves it seems with issues of plagarism. At the end of the video Sugata suggest that we should consider that - ‘Education is a self organising system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon’, fascinating and well worth a look-n-bookmark.

Please feel free to post your comments, regards Barry