Is e-learning better than sex?

That was the question posed by Terry Anderson at The Shock of the Social at Oxford University. I’m not sure I agree with him but here’s his argument anyway –

Why is e-learning better than sex?

• If you get tired, you can stop, save your place and pick up where you left off.
• You can finish early without feeling guilty.
• You can get rid of any viruses you catch with a $50 program from McAfee
• With a little coffee you can do it all night.
• You don’t usually get divorced if your spouse interrupts you in the middle of it.
• And If you're not sure what you are doing, you can always ask your tutor.

Maybe some people have this feeling about Blackboard but what you do in your own time……

Actually that wasn’t Terry’s main argument or a firmly held belief (I hope), it was just by way of an introduction to his keynote on Social Software and Personal Learning Environments.

He argued that student control and freedom are integral to 21st Century life-long education and learning and that education for elites is not sufficient for planetary survival. He concluded that content is now cheap or free and that there is a need to learn to share, recontextulize and re-use. We shouldn’t build value on our content. Content is necessary, but not sufficient, to create a quality educational experience. However, there is no single ‘killer app” in this environment - rather an evolving set of personal and social tools, pedagogies, and resources. Thus according to Stephen Downes "The PLE is an approach not an application."

The rest of the presentations, whilst interesting, didn’t really match up to the opening. Some of the uses of ‘Web 2.0’ were quite controlled, which some argue is against the ideas behind the tools

However, there were some interesting points raised

• Students like social networking tools (myspace, facebook etc.) but have concerns about their use in HE
• Does the proliferation of Web 2.0 mean the end of in-house IT services?
• Students might prefer to use non institutional tools
• A PLE is personally constructed and you don't provide a PLE like you do with a VLE
• Revealing personal information to others on the internet can facilitate deep learning thus, it was argued, there is a relationship between self disclosure and deep learning
• There are a number of very successful ways in which mobile learning can be used to support students.

Bizarrely, when searching for information on the conference tagged with ‘shock2007’, I found this picture – just to prove I was there :-). I was actually reading some interesting information about students’ use of Web 2.0 tools

Surprisingly, by far the most interest section of the conference was the second day – Beyond the Search Engine, which initially may have seemed about as interesting as watching England bore draw against Israel.

Plagiarism and Intellectual Copyright are not normally subjects to get the pulse racing, although some of Alastair Campbell’s homework got a few column inches . However, the thrust of the day was not so much about catching cheats but that firstly, most plagiarism is incompetence rather than wilful cheating and secondly, we should be setting different kinds of assessment; tasks that say ‘build it not find it’, ‘make it not fake it’.

Students don't see plagiarism as a moral issue as most plagiarism arises from misunderstanding and there is no evidence to indicate an increase in deliberate cheating. The question was posed ‘Why do we have peer reviewed journals if not to stop plagiarism amongst academics?’

It was argued that plagiarism is not a technical or a Quality Assurance issue but more a pedagogic issue and one that forces us to create a clearer sense of what learning is. We should teach and not tell, moving away from lectures on plagiarism towards active learning.