Chrisp’s e-learning expriences

E-learning is now being applied for a myraid of different educational purposes. One purpose or use for the e-learning approach that gets rarely mentioned is that of education for social change. In this entry I have pasted a section for the  Journal of Distance Education. The article is tittled e-learning and union mobilisation. It documents and describes an account of e-learning in practice as applied by the Canadian trade union movement; an interesting read:

‘E-learning has obvious contributions to make toward overcoming the problem of space for national and international labour movements. It can help connect dispersed populations for the purposes of solidarity and mobilization. At the same time, in the case of already overworked activists, e-learning can become yet another element of their activist life for which they barely have the time. In one sense, then, e-learning may find a particularly useful application among novice activists who, possibly assured by the pace and anonymity of e-learning, can nevertheless find preliminary entry into the types of informal apprenticeships and mentor-ships of union activism while also building a basic set of skills and sensitivities. More fundamentally, we saw that the oral culture and learning traditions of organized labour did not mix easily with e-learning environments. However, we conclude that when we recognize articulating activity systems as essential to the realization of a learning process and steps are taken to interlink the on-line and off-line worlds, e-learning has something significant to contribute. The emergence of labour history as a topic in one workshop showed us an important example of how heightened attention, functioning activity systems, and hence learning can be generated. Especially when we see critiques of e-learning from the activists/participants in this research, it becomes clear that these and other points must be taken seriously if the technology is to become more than a novelty. This tells us that e-learning can be nothing less than a form ofmobilization and action in the real world, linking past struggles to present struggles, if it is to retain its relevance.’  (Sawchuk, 2002 p.11)

 

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