eLearning, mLearning and now eTeaching, all these terms are coming around again and again and to me they are all starting to look like something from my grad studies – Computer Mediated Communication.
What happens on either end of the pipe, and regardless of the technology that the pipe is made of, if there is a chip and a D/A converter, it’s all CMC.
OLD pulled out a story a couple of weeks ago on eTeaching, something that is taking some press in Nigeria and this morning I found a story about how Ericsson, together with the UN Millennial Villages Program and Earth Institute at New York’s Columbia University are getting mobile phone and data access to poor communities in Africa. Together both these stories suggest one thing. That to make e anything effective, there must be an understanding (and use) of the media at either end. The latter story reminds us that voice is still the killer app and that eTeaching is really the flip side of eLearning – both sides must understand what must be done. But in order to get the eTeaching ideas of video conferencing and the like really to take off for the receivers in places like Africa (these poor villages) must first get the basics into their daily life – this is where the phone comes in.
With mobile broadband and voice, connected learning is really going to be something that can be made to happen as eteaching and learning and the like all come together, now if we can only make that happen here (check out why and why not Web2.0 in the class), North Atlantic countries might actually be able to provide a role model for these African villages.
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