Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Summer Activities

I made a conscious decision this summer not to take on any writing or presenting responsibilities. The reason was to spend time with my 11 year old daughter. We spent considerable time on the golf course and she participated in tennis and basketbal camps. This was one of the best summers for both of us. My daughter won a coaching award at the basketball camp and a golf trophy in the club junior championships - I could not have been prouder.

Now that summer is just about done I have begun work on another manuscript. I had been doing some reflection on the field of distance education as result of a book project I am doing with Marti Cleveland-Innes and having recently read the Handbook of Distance Education edited by Michael Moore. It occurred to me that there is a real need to understand developments in online learning and how they might differentially apply to distance and higher education. In short, it would seem that the scholarship of distance education has reached an evolutionary dead-end with the paradigmatic focus on independent study. That is not to say that distance education will become extinct, but I believe its practice will be constrained by this historical premise. In Moore's Handbook it would seem that most of the prominent distance education scholars hold very much to the independent study principle in the face of the Internet and communications technology. Those scholars who have historically advocated for the importance of two-way communication, discourse and collaboration, have not had a significant foothold in the scholarship of distance education. However, their work has been adopted by those in the emerging field of online learning. This is evidenced by the growing online learning research using the Community of Inquiry Framework. I hope to present a draft of this paper at a conference this winter. I anticipate that it will precipitate some strong reaction from some scholars and practitioners in open and distance education.

Now back to my administrative responsibilities and a meeting with my Provost.