Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Elements of Distance Education Diffusion- Collaborative Interaction

Collaborative interaction has evolved tremendously in terms of distance education.  "Online courses offer the opportunity to create a highly social learning environment, characterized by participation and interactivity for both students and instructors" (Walti & Blaschke, 2009).  Distance education allows people from all over the world collaborate using technology.  It can be through a blog, e-mail, Skype, Google Chat, or from many other social media sites.  As technology advances, it allows for more and better opportunities to collaborate with anyone from anywhere.  Collaboration at a distance through e-mail and phone conversations has evolved into face time and social media type collaboration.  Doering, Miller, and Veletsianos (2008) discusses adventure learning as a part of a collaborative curriculum.  They see this as an opportunity to work with other students, teachers, and content experts.  It allows for discovery through virtual visits and interaction with various sites according to the content learned.   I agree that collaborative learning has evolved through distance education.  With the use of technology and distance education programs, we can learn about anything using more that reading skills.


References:
Brindley, J., Blaschke, L., & Walti, C. (2009). Creating Effective Collaborative Learning Groups in an Online Environment.The International Review Of Research In Open And Distance Learning, 10(3). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/675/1271

Doering, A., Miller, C., & Veletsianos, G. (2008). ADVENTURE LEARNING: Educational, social, and technological affordances for collaborative hybrid distance education. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 9(3), 249-265,347-348. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/231182838?accountid=14872

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