Hello Peter and everyone
I have read Peter’s comments on the new Foresight report with great
interest. I also agree that there are a number of misconceptions about
learners and the social context of learning in HE and an emphasis on
technology as purely a tool for knowledge dissemination/transfer.
There is however a point that I would agree with in the article, drawing on
my experience as an undergraduate student both in Catalonia and the UK.
1. 'Currently the majority of students raise loans and then work long hours
in part time jobs in order to study and afford to live. But for what
purpose? To sit in lecture classes with several hundred other students
listening to academics reading the same notes as they may have done for a
number of years' (Britain towards 2010, p36)
I agree with Peter that sitting in lectures isn’t the primary activity in
students’ academic lives, there is independent study, project and practical
work, tutorials and seminars. However this does not imply that students’
will have more opportunities to interact with each other and the tutor. In
fact I must say that my experience as an undergraduate student was in fact
only of lectures and independent study, with the exception of my last year
in Manchester where I had a supervisor for my dissertation. Claire
Callender’s report for the Dearing Inquiry was done in 1997, two years after
I completed my degree.
Not everyone’s’ experience is the same of course, and as Crook and Light
(1999) indicate, some students seem quite happy with face to face
interactions and would not give it up for electronically mediated
interactions. However I think the pedagogy that is underpinning the method
is more central than the learning environment being face to face or
electronically mediated. For example, I found my experience in networked
learning as a learner was a sort of revelation. Suddenly, I was interacting
and sharing my views with other learners in greater ways that I did face to
face. Of course the technology did not enable this form of learning alone
but it served to support a form of more emancipatory and collaborative
pedagogy that was new to me. Interestingly, one part-time student doing a
course using videoconferencing, said to me that she preferred
videoconferencing tutorials rather than face to face ones. When I asked her
why, she said that videoconferencing tutorials enabled her and the other
students to talk more with each other and the tutor than in face to face
tutorials. Clearly the issue is not the technology itself but the way the
tutorial was facilitated to encourage student’s interaction.
I feel the issue is therefore not of face-to-face versus online or lectures
versus ‘everything else’ but the quality of interaction between students and
tutors.
Mireia
=================================
Mireia Asensio
Research Associate
CSALT
Department of Management Learning
The Management School
Lancaster University
LA1 4 YX
UK
Tel No: 01524-
Fax No: 01524 -844262
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
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