"Distance learning is much the rage today in
education circles and mostly for good reasons. At a minimum, it reminds us that the
educational enterprise is alive and well and living - among other places - in the agendas
of conference developers.
"Distance learning is much the rage today in
education circles and mostly for good reasons. At a minimum, it reminds us that the
educational enterprise is alive and well and living - among other places - in the agendas
of conference developers.
But we might note at the outset that Distance Learning isn't a completely new idea.
Distance Learning might be understood to be as old as writing, perhaps as old as communal learning itself.
I was thinking the other day about the Caves at Lascaux and the images that our ancestors created there on the walls. No one knows for sure why those images of animals were created. Various theories have been suggested. One such theory might be seen as related to Distance Learning.
Perhaps, we might speculate, these pictures were an effort
to train initiates in the hunting skills necessary to succeed at the work of surviving -
training that, considering the likely frenzy that would accompany an actual hunt, might
best proceed at a distance.
So one might imagine that when our ancestors were contemplating the powerful cave images at Lascaux, they were engaging in a form of motivational and educational experience not unrelated to what is available to us today, albeit in more technologically advanced - if not necessarily more aesthetically powerful - media.
But let such speculation be as it may.
Distance Learning IS - in important ways - something new, something that relates to new ways in which we live.
At Lascaux, and for much of the history of human community, people mostly did things together at the same time and place. Their survival depended on their ability to bring the coincident strength of a number to solve common problems of living.
Today, life for many of us is mostly different.
Today, very often, we proceed according to our own personal schedules. We no longer eat together, or shop together, or - more and more - work together at the same time and place. We do these things - and because of contemporary technology, we can do these things - when it's convenient, when it's needed - or just when, and with whom, we want to.
It's not a surprise, then, that more and more we no longer learn together at the same time and place - as many of us did only a generation or so ago when involved in most anything that was thought of as "education."
In important ways, Distance Learning reflects our contemporary situation.
It's not just learning for "the way we were."
It's learning for the way we are ...
Click here for a PowerPoint Presentation about Distance Learning.
Distance Learning Projects
Online Teaching Support
a class taught for Columbia College Chicago
