“The Failure of an Online Program”??

http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Failure_of_an_Online_Program.html

This post was particularly interesting to me because of the digital aspect of the concept of literacy.  The post is about a professor teaching an online English class for students.  The students who enrolled in this class were not there by choice, but because they failed a test- presumably some sort of English placement test.  The author is diving into the mire of making writing fun for students not writing by choice.

“I had long believed that online learning didn’t understand itself.”  That line seems to jump right out of our discussions of literacy.  Doing does not always mean understanding.  ‘Knowing’ and ‘applying’ skills are two different things.  The author seems to be struggling with the concept of what exactly was the point of online learning, and how students related to it.  It is obvious that the online classes were not successful from the authors point of view; instead, author Sarah Michael Morris advocated for a change to “begin playfully outside the borders of how we’ve always taught and how we relate to the machines that can help us teach.”  Obviously the current MOOCS did not suite her fancy.

It was interesting to hear a negative view of online classes from a professor’s point of view.  There seems to be a struggle (that I was previously unaware of) of how to teach this “hybrid pedagogy.”  The uncharted territory without specific methods or rules of teaching literacy seems to be an issue.  In order to instruct others, there seems to be a call for instruction in instruction (talk about a headache.)

I think the development of technology integrated in teaching or learning about literacy should not focus on the technology, but rather the information.  Different information should and could be taught and learned in different ways and cross reference each other.  A few of the studies we read in class mentioned the disconnect between school and the outside world, a bridge that students struggle to cross.  The benefit of utilizing technology is to help push them across that bridge.  By the sound of the article, it sounds like students aren’t the only ones that struggle with that divide.