e-Learning Ecologies: Seven Affordances

e-Learning Ecologies

e-Learning Ecologies, the book and the videos, explore transformations in the patterns of pedagogy that accompany e-learning―the use of computing devices that mediate or supplement the relationships between learners and teachers―to present and assess learnable content, to provide spaces where students do their work, and to mediate peer-to-peer interactions. We suggest that e-learning ecologies may play a key part in shifting the systems of modern education, even as technology itself is pedagogically neutral. The result is an analytical framework with which to differentiate those aspects of educational technology that reproduce old pedagogical relations from those that are genuinely innovative and generative of new kinds of learning.

Following is a video abstract prepared for an in-person plenary presentation:

The Book: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, eds. 2016. e-Learning Ecologies: Principles for New Learning and Assessment. New York NY: Routledge.

e-Learning Ecologies - The MOOC

Join us in our MOOC, offered through Coursera: e-Learning Ecologies: Innovative Approaches to Teaching and Learning for the Digital Age.

For three decades and more, we’ve heard educators and technologists making a case for the transformative power of technology in learning. However, despite the rhetoric, in many sites and many ways education is still relatively untouched by technology. Even when technologies are introduced, the changes sometimes seem insignificant and the results disappointing. If the print textbook is replaced by an e-book, do the social relations of knowledge and learning necessarily change, at all or even for the better? If the pen-and-paper test is mechanized, does this change the nature of our assessment systems?

Technology, in other words, need not necessarily bring significant change or even represent a step forward in education. We propose ‘seven affordances’ of e-learning ecologies which open out genuine possibilities for what we call a ‘New Learning’ – transformative, twenty-first century learning. These affordances, if recognized and harnessed, will prepare learners for success in a world that is increasingly dominated by digital information flows, and tools for communication in the workplace, public spaces and personal life.

e-Learning Ecologies - Online Courses (The Medium is the Message!)

We also offer a course as part of our online offerings through the University of Illinois, HRD 572: e-Learning Ecologies. You can enrol in this course as a non-degree student, or take it as part of our fully online certificate, masters and doctoral programs in Learning Design and Leadership.

Teach e-Learning Ecologies in CGScholar

e-Learning Ecologies is also available in learning module format, available for anybody to teach in the CGScholar platform. Think of this as the twenty-first century substitute for the textbook...

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