Required Readings

Reflections on the required readings for Week One.

Required Readings:
Terminology-Moore & Kearsley, Chapter 1, "Basic Concepts," pp.1-23
History-Moore & Kearsley, Chapter 2, "Historical Context," pp. 24-45
Bates & Poole, Chapter 3, "The role of media and technology in education," pp. 47-74.

The first required reading Distance Education: A Systems View was a great introductory reading assignment. I had actually read this in a past class and it was a nice refresher. The most important thing I gathered from reading those 23 pages was that you have to have a concept of what education is intended to do for society, how we can utilize in the Distance Education feild and the models of education used in the delivery of materials to the student.

The second reading based on the same book although it was chapter two. It gives the history of Distance Education and the generations of evolution it has underwent. When you start a journey of in depth exploration on a particular subject matter the history and evolution is important. Distance education started at the turn of the century and was invented as a for profit idea. It has been aimed at various demographics throughout the decades and currently it is working adults but slowly it is being mainstreamed as a valid alternative for anyone. As technology evolves so does our education what started as a postcard correspondance idea has morphed into a highly technical field with the invent of the internet. The world population as a whole has more information available than any generation before.

The last of the required readings was in the book "Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education" This chapter discusses the role of media and technology in education. This is a wonderful support chapter that can add more demension to the other two chapters. It explores the adaptablity in education and how educators as well as students can be apprehensive to change. The best story I pulled from this chapter is a story about Socrates and how he was upset because he learned that a student had read and memorized a poem. At that point he was infuriated because he felt that students would need to be wise by remembering it and not reading. He felt that you could not become wise without memorizing everything.

Distance Learning is defiantly my favorite term used because it doesn’t have the negative connotations of distributed learning which I feel makes the realm of education appear like a mass marketed idea for profit which I realize that historically correspondence courses have followed the trend that while providing a service they also make profit. E-learning and online learning I believe are too narrow to sum up a field of education mainly because even in an online course many types of technology can be and often is utilized to students. I hadn’t heard flexible learning before and really don’t like that from a low education point of view it would seem unstructured. I try to always look through the eyes of an employer and how they would view each type of education and with that if I had a potential employee I wouldn’t necessarily want one who defines their education as Flexible, or Independent because how will they react to strict deadlines, will they be a team player? In terms of quality I believe that the words online, and E-learning as well as distributed learning all feel relatively generic and I would really want to investigate each program on a potential employees resume to make sure it does come from a respected and accredited college or university. In the texts that I have read for this course and for prior distance courses I believe that Distance Learning seems to win out most likely because it is generic enough to cover a wide variety of technology used in their field.