Rown, via Rown’s blog, reflects on a presentation from the 2008 JISC CETIS conference about the impact of the medium and reiterates its importance in understanding online and offline teaching and learning. Excerpts:
What’s the difference between someone standing in front of a live audience reading aloud a pre-prepared paper, a video or audio recording of the reading and the paper itself? That was one of the questions asked during the stimulating Q&A session that followed Andrew Feenberg’s opening keynote at our 2008 JISC CETIS conference, and one that I feel is important to our conceptualising of online and offline teaching and learning.
Andrew suggested that what we consider ‘a[n academic] course’ is really the interaction between teacher and learner, not the learning materials themselves in whatever format they are presented, an argument I find extremely compelling. The emphasis on the medium by which information is communicated can obscure the importance of that information, the message it is ultimately intended to deliver. As learning technologists and interoperability experts, I guess we at CETIS could be more guilty than many of focusing on the medium: is it a SCORM package, is it ‘good’ QTI, can my tool open your Content Packages? And while these are all undoubtedly important issues for the practicalities of teaching and learning, do we really want to limit the ways in which we assess students, for example, to those that are facilitated by the standards and technologies we use?
