Why Blended Learning?

Something that we should do before embarking on any piece of learning is to ask the question "why do we do this?"

This answer for today has two parts. Part one is another question, "What careers are we preparing our students for? Do they include significant use of digital technology?"

The answer of course is that nearly all careers now require some degree of digital literacy unless you aspire to the glorious life of the Amish furniture maker.

from unifiedstream.com

The second part of the answer comes from the patron saint of Wired magazine and legendary Canadian communications researcher Marshall McLuhan when he famously said, "The medium is the message."

Our students are a part of the first true internet generation. They are a generation plagued with the problem of too much information rather than not enough.

Because of this, how they process information and how they like to work differs greatly from the environment that everyone in teaching is probably used to seeing as a learning space. How we deliver this learning, according to McLuhan, is just as important as what we are delivering if we want it to reach our intended audience.

Student don't understand why, but they don't like to work with tools from the 1990s. They don't see the architecture behind it but they know, because they have been shaped by tools of the app age, that using those older tools is often clunky, slow and inefficient.

We have to meet them in a place they are familiar with and put in the effort to use modern tools with modern pedagogy to shape them for the age they will graduate into.