TEL-lingit like IT is

OK, so the title’s try-hard. TEL is “Technology Enhanced Learning”, an aspect of education I’ve been professionally involved in since 2000. IT is “information technology”. This blog explores TEL from the perspective of a practicing theorist.

I’ll try not to be too clever with the word plays. This blog’s domain is probably bad enough for geeky cleverness to be entirely out of my system! What I will always try to be, though, is informed by literature and primary studies.

It’s important that I give some context for what will follow. I agree entirely with Anderson & Zawacki-Richter that online distance education:

• is a discipline in its own right.

• may apply a broad social sciences-based research methodology, and although it is most appropriate, the field is eclectic and should allow for, and value, a multiplicity of research paradigms including positivist, interpretive, critical, and pragmatic research paradigms.

• is relevant to both distance learning and information and communication technology-mediated campus-based learning.

• despite the global context in which it is practiced, is deeply embedded in cultural, national, and bureaucratic institutions that greatly impact its function (2015, p.486).

I also have to agree with the sentiments of Otto Peters, a distance education theorist I’ve long admired, in the same volume:

Research in the emerging field of online distance education has, so far, evolved in a somewhat haphazard fashion, consisting largely of an assemblage of contributions made by researchers working on different topics, often in isolation from one another (2015, p.ix).

This blog is my attempt to assemble and consolidate key ideas related to TEL based on reading, reflection and (my own contextual) reality.

Watch this space…
—
Zawacki-Richter, O., & Anderson, T. (Eds.). (2014). Online Distance Education: Towards a Research Agenda. AU Press.