Week 1" question 5

[edwige...@gmail.com]

Here please take some time to react to a quote or a section of the
chapter that caught your attention. Please, provide the quote and page
number and explain your reaction to that quote.

[Skyler]

I would like to respond to the assertion that higher education is
shielding itself from e-learning. Apart from being faced with the
revolution to methodology that e-learning creates, I believe that
there is another source of anxiety that arises from e-learning. With
the existence and development of a growing asynchronous and
collaborative community of learners also comes a serious problem with
student exploitation of this community. The incidence of cheating and
plagiarism have been on the rise in my classrooms and in the
classrooms of fellow students. I think that this is one of the parts
of the "explosive impact" of e-learning. This issue makes the
Internet be an enemy to learning and to academic dishonesty. From my
point of view there should be a university effort to revamp the
existing honor code to include mention of plagiarism with regard to
cutting and pasting of online material. I believe that a portion of
the problem arises from the fact that there has not been enough
classroom/ top down discussion of proper, academic methods of using
technology. Perhaps the higher education retreat from e-learning is
exacerbating this problem because there has not been an institutional
effort to define and support the parameters of appropriate
participation in the e-learning community.

[Maggie McCullar]

There are 2 passages/points of the reading that I would like to
comment on and react to.
First, I like the fact that our text recognizes the report by the Web-
based Education Commission (p. 2) which states that a program "'should
be built on a deeper understanding of how people learn, how new tools
support and assess learning gains, what kinds of organizational
structures support these gains, [. . .] '" (2). This is one concern of
mine that I have had about online learning. Because we teach students
with various learning styles, does online teaching limit and alienate
some students, or does it provide richer learning experiences that
could potentially address more learning styles? I'm not sure yet, but
this is something that I would like to keep in mind as we progress and
as I develop my course.

Second, I was actually a little angry at the following statements:
"Moreover, students in higher education are not receiving the
educational experiences they need to develop the critical and self-
directed higher education skills required for lifelong learning," (3).
Later we find that, "there is far more rhetoric than reality in the
assertion that communities of inquiry in higher education today
encourage students to approach learning in a critical manner and
process information in a deep and meaningful way," (5).
Does anyone else think that this is a bit harsh and generalizing? As a
teacher AND student, I was actually offended. Yes, I do think that
that there certainly are deficiencies and gaps in higher education,
but I think the statements above are extremely pessimistic.

On Jan 15, 10:19 am, edwige.si...@gmail.com wrote: