I have been experimenting with Flock as my browser the last few months. There are some things I love, but it is still in an obvious, true beta form (as contrasted with other, unnamed, corporations who call things “beta” when they really are full-fledged applications!). If you haven’t seen Flock, it is a “Web 2.0” browser that makes it SO easy to drop photos into your Flickr account, post to del.icio.us, or drop a quick blog post to any of your blogs. My favorite feature is the snippets feature, which allows you to drag and drop snippets of websites you visit so you can paste them into blog posts later on.
But the new reason why I love Flock is that it automatically saves copies of your blog posts. How cool is that? So a long time ago I wrote a post about the generations of distance education, and the browser crashed (yes, it is still beta). I never rewrote the post because I was frustrated over the lost effort. But lo and behold, I found a place on my hard drive where Flock had been saving my blog drafts! So, without further ado, I’ll share some ideas I’ve had on how to characterize the history of distance education.
Generations of Distance Education
For this group writing project (this BlogTracks, and a future article that we hope to write), I was asked to research the history of distance education, specifically technology-enhanced distance education. Before I really looked at the literature to see what other scholars have done to characterize the history of technology-enhanced DE, I came up with the following “eras” or “periods” of distance education:
Period 1: CBI/CAI. This was the precursor to Internet-based education, where distance education was mediated by computer-based means, such as CD-Roms. This type of DE tended to focus on bounded content with linear progression through the material (see Merrill, 1996). HyperCard was perhaps the flagship software used for designing this instruction, and was instrumental in opening up new avenues of student mobility in learning and control.
Period 2: Distance transmission. This was the period when we used the Internet to transmit learning materials back and forth. That was the extent of the interaction, and instruction was very similar to the CBI/CAI period except that the medium (the Internet) had changed. During this time, Clark (1994) argues that the medium does not influence learning. He’s right … because the medium hasn’t been used to change any of our teaching methods.
Period 3: Distance interaction. This is the period where computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) emerges as a theory and an instructional method, and emphasis is on creating virtual communities and collaborative spaces where learners can interact together.
Period 4: The emergence of CMS tools. Two course management giants, WebCT and Blackboard, explode in popularity. DE becomes more popular and accessible to different groups of instructors and learners who may not have web-authoring abilities. A few points about this period, which is the period we are in now:
- Now, with over 95% of colleges and universities using some form of e-learning system, (Pollack, 2003)
- Blackboard and WebCT, each being used now at over 2,000 different academic institutions (Pollack, 2003; Arnone, 2002). These two companies have now merged.
- Besides Blackboard and WebCT, there are several other CMS companies, including Desire2Learn, eCollege, and Jenzabar. There are also many open-source or freely distributed CMS products, such as the Manhattan Virtual Classroom Project, Sakai, OpenCourseWare (developed by Utah State University) and a popular open-source alternative called Moodle
- “CMSs have become mission critical systems for many institutions” (Young, 2002)
Period 5: Mobile Learning. This period has been emerging simultaneously with at least periods three and four, but I think this will become even more important in the near future. Chris Dede has explained this trend well in a couple of keynote presentations that he has given at the SITE and AECT conferences, where he described how we have had students going to virtual learning spaces (such as MOOs and MMOGs), but now more and more we have virtual reality coming to the students, and existing simultaneously with the students in the real world through mobile devices. So, for example, instead of students going to a virtual world such as Quest Atlantis, they will have the virtual learning quests on their palm pilots. They will be able to interact with the virtual world and virtual reality as they walk around, participate in, and interact with the real world.
I know I haven’t explained that very well … I need to reread some of Dede’s work, and then I can perhaps write a follow-up post explaining this better.
Period 6: The read/write web. This period is characterized by tools like Furl, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Flickr, Writely, Google Spreadsheets, MySpace, wikis, blogs, and all the other quickly emerging social learning tools available on the Internet. This type of instruction has been championed by various educational bloggers, but is becoming more mainstream. It is typified by involving students in creating, sharing, and building knowledge bases as an e-learning community. I don’t think we really know what the implications will be of these tools on the future of learning.
Remember that this list was basically just the product of my own brainstorming, and hasn’t been refined yet. Since I created this list, I have read about Taylor’s (2001) characterization of “5 Generations of DE”, based on Nipper’s (1989) original list of three generations. Lou, Bernard, and Abrami (2006) also refer to Taylor’s characterizations of the history of DE. I like Taylor’s list, and think that since reading about it, I will re-write my descriptions of the history of DE.
But I’ll get to Taylor’s description of the history of DE in a later post. For right now, I’m open to any suggestions and feedback on my current description of this possible method for chunking the history of technology-enhanced DE into six periods or major patterns.
Questions for you!
I already think I’m missing one or two glaring trends that I need to add, so I admit up front that this is not yet very well developed. But what is your feedback?
References
Arnone, M. (2002). Course-management outfits still seek elusive profits. The Chronicle of Higher Education. July 12, 2002.
Clark, R.E. (1994). Media will never influence learning.Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(2), 21–29.
Merrill Paul F., Hammons K., Bret R. Vincent. Reynolds P.L., Christensen L., Tolman M.. Computers in Education. 3rd Edition. Allyn and Beacon. 1995
Pollack, T. A. (2003). Using a course management system to improve instruction. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Association of Small Computer Users in Education, held at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Young, J. (2002). Pricing shifts by Blackboard and WebCT cost some colleges much more. The Chronicle of Higher Education. April 19, 2002.