This is quite a good paper, and though it will take some time to read, the effort is rewarded. In a nutshell, Jon Dron argues that virtual learning environments (ak learning management systems), when designed along a course and class model, lose too many of the affordances or a physical campus (for example, people don't leave the course through a corridor, they just leave). A person's 'learning environment' is their own self, not some digital construct. He suggests some ways to improve this design (which I heartily endorse): "to allow synchronous and/or asynchronous dialogue to occur on every page or screen of the system... To allow at least some parts of the system to be free of roles... (and) "courses are just one of many kinds of organizational unit, with selectively permeable boundaries through which others can pass, or with which they can overlap." You can't really do this in an LMS, and other attempts (like the personal learning environment or Educause's NGDLE) have fallen short. Still, "the focus – both digitally and pedagogically – should be on making it possible for learners to assemble the services into their environments themselves, in order to avail themselves of the support they need, when they need it, for the purposes they intend." Image: Imgur - it showed up in my search for 'nple ngdle', a perfect illustration.
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