Blended Learning Part 2

Welcome back right after your various internships! 
I hope you made heaps of different and stunning experiences to guide you through everything that comes up.

We were talking about pros and cons of Blended Learning today and tried to sum up some of the contents. As last time this is based on one of the university papers we discussed earlier today. As we had an all-day lecture, I will post it in two parts...easier to read!

Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow!


This section explores the notion of blended learning, starting from the premise that such a term requires two or more different kinds of things that can then be mixed. The possible nature of those things, and of their mixing, will be explored through the various sections below.

Mixing E-learning with Traditional Learning
Perhaps the most common ‘blend’ discussed in research publications concerns the mixing of elearning
and traditional forms of learning. This is a particularly muddled definition, not least because what counts as ‘e-learning’ is notoriously hard to define. The Department for Education and Skills (2003), for example, recently provided the following definition:

If someone is learning in a way that uses information and communication technologies, they are
using e-learning. They could be a pre-school child playing an interactive game; they could be a
group of pupils collaborating on a history project with pupils in another country via the Internet
[… etc.] – it all counts as e-learning.

Providing a list, rather than a definition, is interesting: it points to a desire to include, rather than specify or exclude. Indeed, the excerpt suggests that almost anything that has had any connection with computers may count as e-learning, and that if in doubt the term can be stretched to include borderline cases. The problem with this is that the term is amorphous, lacking any kind of clarity. It is simply the accretion of cases, with no indication of how new examples should be included or rejected from the term. There are no principles underlying it.
As soon as a principled position is taken, the term ‘e-learning’ becomes problematic. From an activity theoretic perspective (Kuutti, 1996), for example, all activities involve a technology of some sort and there is no particular reason to distinguish between those with and without the ‘e-’ prefix. Equally, there is no definition of ‘traditional’ learning. This is typically assumed to refer to face-to-face teaching, often in the form of lectures and/or seminars; however, since forms of correspondence learning have existed for well over a century (Peters, 1998) there seems to be no reason for deeming some kinds of teaching as ‘traditional’ and others as not. Indeed, for lecturers who have begun their careers since the advent of the Internet, there is little reason to assume that web-based learning is not part of their ‘tradition’ of teaching. For these reasons, the idea of defining blended learning in terms of these two ‘types’ seems inappropriate.

Mixing Online Learning with Face-to-Face
A conceptually clearer position arises from descriptions of blended learning as involving a mix between online and face-to-face teaching. However, on closer inspection this is also problematic. Dreyfus’s critique of learning from the Internet (2001) provides a useful starting point to explore this mix. His argument is that learning on the Internet is impoverished, since it results in a disembodied experience and the production of fragmented, fractured ‘selves’. He contrasts this with the embodied, unified self that he believes is present ‘off’ the Internet. The important point of Dreyfus’s critique is that the Internet – or at least, learning online – is somehow special. His particular concerns are relatively easy to dismiss, resulting from inconsistencies in his position. Either learners are embodied or they are not: the Internet has no power to tear them from their bodies. They are no more disembodied sat at a computer than talking to a teacher, and the relevance of their embodiment to learning is no more problematic here than if they were watching a television broadcast or reading a book. Similarly, the notion of ‘self’ is either fragmented (in the postmodern sense of being distributed, contingent and multiply interpreted) or it is not. It is simply inconsistent to attribute special powers to the Internet, which is nothing more than an extension of file sharing networks. This highlights the central problem for this mix: why ‘online’? Arguably, there is nothing particularly special about the Internet per se. One possible way out of this might be to shift attention away from learning online and to mediated learning instead; this possibility will be explored below.

Mixing Media

To avoid the problem of treating online learning as a special case, it can be proposed that the purpose of blended learning is to explore the mixing of media. As well as being problematic, this definition is also unhelpful. The possibility of mixing media for pedagogic advantage is given relatively high profile within the research literature; Laurillard’s classic text (1993), for example, hinges upon this idea, providing tables that describe the characteristics of different media in terms of qualities that are mapped onto her conversational framework. The problem with this is that these tables ‘essentialise’ media; they present the media as types with fixed (essential) qualities. The result is that Laurillard preserves the clarity of her argument by dealing in stereotypes. This is in marked contrast to teachers’ experience of these ‘media’. For example, Laurillard portrays lectures as being primarily, or even exclusively, transmissive. A study that asked lecturers to describe their lecturing practice (Oliver & Conole, 2002) revealed that what the term ‘lecture’ denoted to them varied according to the topic being taught, the size of the group, the year students were in, students’ expectations, what else was happening in the course, and so on. What this illustrates is that pedagogy is a form of practice – a socially constructed experience, rather than an inherent quality of media. For this reason alone the idea of mixing media becomes problematic.
However, in addition, there is the question of whether such a definition is useful. Within any course – indeed, in any learning situation of any duration, formal or otherwise – multiple ‘media’ will be used. (This certainly applies to published work where sessions or courses are analysed; Martin Oliver & Keith Trigwell potentially, it might not apply to studies of a single particular action or interaction, but such studies are exceptional.) These may be largely taken-for-granted media such as speech, print and pictures, but nonetheless their diversity is inevitable in the media-rich society in which we are based. Consequently, all learning ‘blends’ media (if we are willing to accept the notion of media as ‘types’).

As a result, all learning is blended learning. The term does not rule anything out; it has no discriminatory power. Consequently it is redundant and unnecessary.

References:
Department for Education and Skills (2003) Towards an E-learning Strategy. Bristol: HMSO.

Oliver, M. & Conole, G. (2002) Supporting Structured Change: toolkits for design and evaluation, in
R. Macdonald (Ed.) Academic and Educational Development: research, evaluation and changing practice in
higher education, pp. 62-75. SEDA Research Series. London: Kogan Page.
Peters, O. (1998) Learning and Teaching in Distance Education. London: Kogan Page.
Kuutti, K. (1996) Activity Theory as a Potential Framework for Human Computer Interaction Research, in
B.A. Nardi (Ed.) Context and Consciousness: activity theory and human-computer interaction, pp. 17-44.
Cambridge: MIT Press
Dreyfus, H. (2001) On the Internet (Thinking in Action). London: Routledge.
Laurillard, D. (1993) Rethinking University Teaching. London: RoutledgeFalmer.