Book review
E-learning in the 21st Century
RoutledgeFalmer, January 2003
Author: DR Garrison & Terry Anderson
Review by Donald Clark, Epic
Don’t be fooled with the grandiose title. What this book
actually does is promote the rather dated and blinkered view that
e-learning is the sole preserve of higher education. In fact, it
can be argued that e-learning is at its most primitive in Higher
education where Blackboard, WebCT and other tools have produced
heaps of course notes but little in the way of sophisticated content
and/or learning. Higher Education has much to learn from other areas
of education as well as corporate training.
It also an unashamedly ‘collaborative constructivist’
text – the new orthodoxy – although John Dewey, rather
than Lev Vygotsky, is the source of their educational theory. Indeed,
Vygotsky doesn’t appear in the book at all. They are such
a fan of Dewey that the same Dewey quote appears at the start of
both chapters 2 and 8 (this may be a publishing error as it doesn’t
seem relevant in chapter 2).
In fact, their general philosophical statements are rather weak,
claiming that all knowledge is a social artefact – no it’s
not. My knowledge that this text is black is not a social construct.
Another tired statement is the ‘no significant difference’
claim i.e. that there are no significant differences in learning
outcomes when different delivery media are compared; not true. There
are hundreds of studies that show such differences. Just for starters
try Reeves and Nass The Media Equation – 35 studies in one
book alone – reviewed by me elsewhere.
The book is built around a triumvirate of concepts: social, cognitive
and teaching presences. This is their holy trinity. We are sucked
into the scholastic world of abstract nouns: social presence, cognitive
presence, teaching presence, insight, applicability, identification,
exploration and so on. Is it any wonder that educational theory
is treated with suspicion? At least the ‘teaching presence’
section gives practical examples of what one can say to guide online
discussion. Other than this the prose is ponderous. I had to literally
‘wade’ through to the end.
The ‘technology’ content in the book is slight. They
tell us that the AECT definition is the ‘most common definition
of educational technology’. Sorry guys, no one I’ve
spoken to has even heard of the AECT (answers on a postcard). Their
four generations of educational technology are also rather weak
ending with a tangential discussion about the ‘semantic’
web. The chapter on assessment and evaluation does come to life
with a few insights into assessing and evaluating collaborative
learning but the last chapters on organisational issues and future
directions say nothing new.
This is a short book, but a long haul. At 123 pages this is a pretty
slim work, which is unfortunately padded out by two extraneous and
dull appendices. You really have to believe in their three ‘presences’
to gain much from the text. One last thing. I’m always nervous
about an e-learning book that doesn’t have GOOGLE in its index!
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