All entries for Monday 11 April 2005

April 11, 2005

Process more important than content in Warwick e–learning?

Follow-up to Response to Derek Morrison's argument about the attraction of non–institutional elearning services from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

In a presentation to a small group of lecturers from around the university, John Dale emphasised that it may be that developing useful academic-IT processes (and tools to support them) may be much more important for Warwick than developing content.

Main text

John's argument for this is that:

  • in Warwick teaching, most content changes rapidly, therefore is not suited to capturing definitively;
  • the content is complex and expensive to reproduce online;
  • the important content is emergent from the interactions of staff and students.

I would add to this Derek Morrison's argument that IT in HE should aim to support higher level skills, which are social, creative and emergent.

This explains the development of services that support informal, self-organized, emergent learning, such as Warwick Blogs.


Robert O'Toole : 11 Apr 2005 11:17 |  Tags:   |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem