Nicholson, Paul and McDougall, A. 2005, Elearning: 40 years of evolution?, in WCCE 2005 : 8th IFIP World Conference on Computers in Education: 40 years of computers in education: what works?, Emerald, Bradford, England, pp. 1-6.
International Federation for Information Processing World Conference on Computers in Education
Start page
1
End page
6
Publisher
Emerald
Place of publication
Bradford, England
Summary
Cun-ent rhetoric around the use of 'eLearning' in Higher Education relates particularly to Internet-based flexible eLearning programs that focus on sustaining particular communities of practice. In this paper we argue that this contempormy view of what eLearning comprises arises from a lack of historical perspective on what the focus of educational eLearning programs has been over the past 40 years. Contemporary descriptions of eLearning as a 'new mode of learning' are fallacious and ignore its 40-year evolution from 1: 1 localised didactic models (both constmctivist and behaviourist) to many-to-many distributed social-constmctivist learning models. In addition, the historic divide between Education and Training has led to both the concurrent development of different notions, foci, and labels for technology-enhanced learning in different contexts and situations, and different conceptual origins arising in acquisitive and participatory learning metaphors. We argue that a more inclusive and historically aware conceptual framework is needed to be able to accurately describe what the full repertoire 'eLearning' really embraces
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