Demonstrating the possibilities.

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There's nothing new in this enthusiasm, and nothing wrong with it either. Still, it seems to fit a rather depressing pattern. As far back as a decade ago I remember both trying out and demonstrating an early web-conferencing tool. At sessions such as this we almost never dealt with actual learning (or even teaching) but instead (after the technical difficulties had, hopefully, been ironed out) with "you could use this for ...", or "with a group of students you might ...". And of course the same thing is still happening today. Recently I had the "opportunity" to set up and take part in an Interwise session for a virtual course. The session actually went quite well - students raised their hands and got permission to speak, they seemed to listen to one another, they occasionally (very occasionally) voted, and seemed on the whole to be as bored in that session as they would have been in a classroom that would have been covering the same material. The gap between the world-shattering possibilities that these tools seem to embody and the actual use that they're put to is only very partially bridged by the demonstrations of how they could perhaps be used that seem to take up the bulk of their use.

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Go to: The greatest invention since sliced bread, or
Go to: A magic strand?