EVERYONE ELSE ON DISTANCE EDUCATION

In a previous post I defined "distance education". The post was long and drawn out but basically said that disance education was any education where the teacher and class are not all together learning at one physical location. Now that we've chatted and seen what the Doc says I guess I was off a bit. It isnt just the teacher and learner being apart, but rather simply that they are not the same person at all. If two people are not the same person then any learning between the two requires there be distance education.

In the post I mentioned a fear of mine that education will be almost all done outside of a traditional classroom in the near future. Maybe this is just a dooms day scenerio for me or perhaps it is the inevitable future.

I found some things others posted about DE very interesting. First, someone said "Distance Education means a way of getting an education that isn’t on campus or at school." They seemed to be making the same error many of us make an assume that distance education means not in the same room when it only means that some form of communication is needed regaurdless of distance. This seemed to be a very common mistake made by many of us and I would say that most people out there would make a similar error in thinking. We can blind ourselves to what is common to us or what we percieve as traditional and comfortable.

Quote #2 "Distance Learning is an educational experience that allows students who might not otherwise have the opportunity, the chance to learn by interacting with others and exploring the content on their own." Again, this doesn't really seem to be accurate. I mean, yes distance learning is all learning so it provides everyone the opportunity to learn. But it isn't some mysterious and amazing fix to those people that can't otherwise learn.

Quote #3 "distance learning is the ability to offer educational opportunities for students and other individuals/groups from a distance. Distance learning provides people the opportunity to better them selves with little disruption to their schedules and lives." This one in many ways is very true. It does offer the opportunity for students to be education from a distance. But only in the since that all education is at a distance. But the scheduling issue has nothing to do with "distance education", but is rather just an outcome of using certain technologies. Some technologies such as email and the Internet allow schedules to be more flexible then oral transfer of knowledge.