The Classroom Is ‘Distance Learning’; the Web Is Connected Learning

via Campus Technology “Some lament the isolating or distancing affects of the Web; yet, for educators, the Web can actually reconnect us with the natural, holistic process of learning. The Web, in fact, brings us closer to how humans learned for millennia before the five-century-long print disruption that truly was isolating and distancing.

From the first bits of clothing and the first sharpened stones, humans have augmented their capabilities with technologies. Our civilization now is so built-out that we literally live within our technologies: our homes, clothing, cars, infrastructure, even our human-developed language. These technologies mediate our reality: keeping us warmer or cooler than the atmosphere but also mediating between each other, as language does. We think of language as a way to connect, but it can also be a way to distance, to carefully avoid physical combat through negotiation, and even to separate us from each other. Considering all of the technologies humans live with or within, it is easy to understand the power of the simple phrase “what we make, makes us.”” [Continue Reading at Campus Technology]