Posted to Diigo 06/10/2010

Mohamed Amine Chatti’s ongoing research on Technology Enhanced Learning: Deficiencies in Current TEL Models

• The view of knowledge as an object that can be stored and reused makes that what is presented as learning management is simply content management under a new label
• Information is explicit knowledge that is easily expressed, captured, stored and reused
• Only a small fraction of valuable knowledge is explicit and there is a huge mass of high-quality knowledge embedded in people, which is not easily expressible and cannot be recorded in a codified form. This hard-to-articulate knowledge is what Polanyi called tacit knowledge
• Furthermore, capturing and storing knowledge as reusable learning objects in centralized repositories makes that knowledge can be isolated from its context, but knowledge is context sensitive
• “If knowledge is separated from [it’s context], it turns into information”
• Traditional LMS-driven TEL approaches share the view according to which learning is regarded as a process limited by the duration of the semester or term
• Learning is continuous and fluid and cannot be reduced to a process with a clearly defined beginning and end
• The view of learning as an institution-controlled process has led to the development of instructional design specifications that aim to describe a learning flow in a standardized manner, but learning cannot be reduced to a string of predetermined processes
• The linearity of the institution-controlled learning process is not well adjusted to describing what is actually going on in learning in a world of radical discontinuous change
• There is much evidence that current TEL approaches use technology to increase the efficiency of existing practices rather than to improve the effectiveness of the learning experience
• The LMS is designed with the primary focus on management and control and is driven by the needs of the educational institution. LMS-driven TEL solutions follow a one-size-fits-all approach and suffer from an inability to give learners the opportunity to contribute to the learning process in significant ways
• current TEL 2.0 solutions continue to privilege the teacher/institution, rather than the learner, as the central element in the learning experience
• These solutions share a common emphasis on how to best integrate the emergent Web 2.0 technologies into the learning process without influencing the traditional pedagogical principles and policies imposed by formal educational institutions
• In sum, current TEL models, driven by technology-push, might make the learning experience faster or cheaper but not necessarily better. They aim at efficiency (i.e. doing the thing right) rather than effectiveness (i.e. doing the right thing). They use technology primarily to make the traditional institution-centric learning model more efficient. This model, however, remains untestable, unchallenged, and consequently unchanged