Not in the sense
of nearly learning, but of learning in a virtual environment of some form
or another. This may be in terms of some sort of virtual world, a
three dimensional model which can be accessed via a computer, or in the
abstract 'cyberspace' made up of countless documents on the world wide
web and beyond.
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Connectivism and personal learning environments vs.
institutional Virtual Learning Environments
I have recently
had the pleasure of being involved in a piece of research about the perceived
suitability of a system such as Facebook as a learning environment as
opposed to one like BlackBoard. As
a result, we have a forthcoming paper in JCAL and a conference
presentation for the 8th
Annual Durham BlackBoard Conference, which was a very informative and
enjoyable event.
Essentially, it
was notable that learners will learn in a connectionist setting even when
there is not educational content provided for them (which is what people
do, of course – learn things!), even if they don’t think it is a suitable
place to learn. Also, they report
learning more frequently if they use the system more frequently. Which may be what you would expect, but
the same is not noticeably true for the institutionally provided system. To be fair, it was hard to detect a
trend with the VLE because almost everyone reports learning with it, but
then most also say they wouldn’t learn through it if it wasn’t used as a
repository for their notes!
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