This (which comes by way of Stephen Downes’ excellent blog), is a nice little outline that argues in favor of promoting collaborative online learning (as opposed to self-paced with learning objects that have no social interaction associated with them) and promoting student autonomy within that model. All of this is worth saying over and over again, as loudly as possible. One complimentary point that the author misses is that, in an online learning environment, students have autonomy whether we design for it or not. There is no instructor looking over their shoulder or making eye contact. Unfortunately, if we don’t plan for student autonomy, then their only real choice for exercising it is to tune out. Better to give them more constructive choices.
There’s also a bit about emergence in here. I have to get around to writing an article about this; it is very much in the air but so far nobody has really pinned down exactly what we think it can do for online communities and, even harder, how we think we can make it work. There are some fairly specific mechanisms by which self organization works (at least in biology); I’m going to have to spend some time looking at what we actually know about how emergence works in groups of organisms. Stay tuned.
Michael Feldstein is the founder of e-Literate who currently works as the Senior Program Manager for MindTap at Cengage Learning. For more information, see his profile page.
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