Massive open online courses turned fifteen this year. Coursera launched in 2012, Udacity the same year, edX in 2013. Back then, the rhetoric was that they would democratize higher education and put pressure on tuition by offering Stanford, MIT, and Harvard lectures to anyone with a laptop. A few years later the reporting turned to … Read more
Seventh/eighth grade teacher Clarence Fisher describes his “thin walled” classroom in Snow Lake, Manitoba, where students regularly use the Web to collaborate globally. His work illustrates how networked learning environments deepen critical thinking and problem solving, challenge traditional school structures built on scarcity of knowledge and teachers, and shift control of learning toward connected, social, online/offline experiences that mirror the real world students are entering.
Reflecting on what students describe as the benefits of online courses, we question whether this version of “online learning” is truly different from traditional content delivery, and argue for a model that leverages networks, inquiry, and learner-driven paths rather than simple digitized coursework.
A look at how Concord School, a special needs school in Victoria, used open source and homegrown social tools—blogging, photo sharing, bookmarking, and game-making—to document learning and prepare students for a global networked world.
From the “Building the Compelling Case Department” comes this piece in the Harvard Graduate School of Education magazine Ed. about how students are already learning in social networks, why their emerging skills matter, and why educators must engage these tools themselves to help students use them to their full learning potential.
Jeff Jarvis argues that in today’s media landscape, everybody is a network, and that networks are now about sharing, openness, and fluid participation rather than control and one-way distribution. This has powerful implications for education, where schools remain largely static, closed, and control-oriented, and where both teachers and students rarely get to develop true network literacy or practice working in distributed, collaborative environments.