“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic." Blended learning, where students’ face-to-face education is blended with Internet resources or online courses, has been gaining considerable attention in education reform circles. It has become entangled with the ambiguous notion of personalized learning and is being positioned as the new way to individualize learning in competency-based education systems.
Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and a key proponent of blended learning, claims that it is the “new model that is student-centric, highly personalized for each learner, and more productive, as it delivers dramatically better results at the same or lower cost” (Horn and Staker 2011, 13). To what extent is this a new model of learning in a digital age? How are private corporations employing old rhetoric to advance new avenues into public education? Most importantly, is blended learning becoming yet another overhyped myth on the crowded road of technology-as-education-reform panacea?
7 Comments
"The oak fought the wind and was broken, At one time or another we all come face-to-face with real hardships in life, whether they be social, emotional, financial and/or physical. It is an inevitability of being human, and something that life’s wisdom gets around to teaching us all.
How we cope with this adversity is dependent on our ability to manage change and reshape our lives. To adapt, and be able to bounce back from adversity, which is a central part of the human condition, we must build resilience in children and youth. As Editor of The Learning Team publication, which reaches over 25 000 parents across our province, I have dedicated the April 2015 edition to exploring the notion of resilience at a time in our history when it is desperately needed, perhaps not just for children but society writ large. |
AuthorPhil McRae, Ph.D. Archives
November 2021
Categories |