PUTTING THE LEARNING BACK INTO LEARNING TECHNOLOGY (original) (raw)

The story of technology and teaching in higher education has generally been one of successive false dawns. Each major technological advance has been ritually hailed as heralding a revolution in either the quality or cost of education (or both). Large sums of money have been expended on foot of such predictions -but, in each case, the long term impact has been found to be, at best, modest (at worst, actually negative). The application of Internet technologies in education has followed this pattern quite consistently -from hyperbolic claim, through commitment of sometimes extraordinary amounts of resource (admittedly, in this case, at the irrational height of "dot.com" fever), to both public and not-so-public failure to deliver any recognisable revolution ("no significant difference" -again). So what might we learn from this? A common factor, already recognised in earlier iterations, seems to be preoccupation with technology per se, and neglect of pedagogical theory. Indeed, many recent innovations, though technologically dazzling, seem to have been premised on the most naive and primitive theories of knowledge and learning. Yet beneath the technological hype and dazzle, the Internet may yet have something genuinely profound to bring to education. From a social constructionist view of learning (and teaching) there are signs of a slower, quieter -and much cheaper -Internet revolution, under such unlikely rallying cries as "open content", "wikiwiki", "blogging" and "moodling". In this paper we will review these developments, relate them to each other and to theoretical foundations, and finally risk some continuing optimism about the ultimate role of the Internet in enhancing higher education.