Student's Experiences of E-Learning in Higher Education

Disclaimer: this one is written by people I work and study with.

This book seems to be written more to target people running e-learning at a university than the run-of-the-mill academic (or grad student). It takes the approach that the University should be treated as an ecology, where all the parts need to work in harmony together, rather than as a hierarchy. That the University as a whole should focus on Learning as its raison d'être, since all aspects of a university's core business are about learning - in the case of students, learning to become a member of a community of knowledge; in the case of researchers, learning by discovering new knowledge. It looks at how to try to improve the functioning of a University using this ecological approach.

What made if particularly interesting was that it was written very much from the point of view of the Uni I work at, and examples were drawn from research done at this Uni. The authors, Rob Ellis and Peter Goodyear, are respectively the Director of E-Learning at Sydney University, and my PhD supervisor. So it was quite fascinating seeing how they thought a university should be run, and comparing that to how our uni is run.

Overall I got a lot more from the high-level picture of how e-learning at a University runs than I got ideas about how students experience e-learning at a Uni, but that is probably because it covers a lot of the ground covered in the previous pile of textbooks I had read. The important idea that it contributes to my thinking about student learning is that e-learning should not be considered in isolation or in contrast against traditional teaching and learning methods; but that rather that it should be viewed holistically as part of a larger picture of how students are learning.

Perhaps I got distracted by the big picture Sydney Uni stuff which, from my point of view, came across almost as insider gossip, and was distracted from the main message a bit; but even then this was a useful viewpoint to digest, and will stop me thinking of e-learning as something that has to compete with traditional learning, and lead me more to see how to integrate e-learning with other modes of learning. Certainly, students aren't seeing it as an either/or proposition, but rather as complementary parts of a learning toolkit that they deploy strategically when figuring out how to learn effectively.

Tuck

This is the last in the King Raven trilogy by Stephen Lawhead. I talked about book two previously, and my impressions of the third part of the trilogy are much the same as the previous ones. They are nicely done, and written so that I'll enjoy them nearly as much as my nine-year-old son will.

This one is centered around Tuck, the anglo-saxon friar whose real name is Aethelfrith, but who gets given a nickname (appropriate to his stature) that is more palatable to the welsh tongue. Friar Tuck was important in the previous books, but is central to the plot of this third book. This third book has a wider scope than the previous ones, and Rhi Bran's band of outlaws become a rebellion and have to face battle with the full strength of English might.

It works well, and an afterword tells us (with quotes from Anglo-Saxon chronicles of the time) that several of the welsh kings involved in the story actually did fight the Ffreinc (Norman rulers of England), with some success - the author is defending his tale against readers who will doubt the likely possibility of the events in the trilogy. Tuck is a satisfying conclusion to the story, and is probably the best of the series.

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep packs quite a punch. It's supposed to be pretty much the definitive hard-boiled detective novel, and it certainly lives up to that description. Having read it, I now want to go and watch the film. It would be hard to pack as much story into a film as was in this rather slender (by today's standards) novel.

What I love about Chandler's work is the writing. You can't help but sit there in awe at the compact, urgent vitality of it. It is personified in the protagonist, Philip Marlowe, who is all that a hard-boiled detective ought to be - smart, wily, quick, honest (in general, not in specifics) and trustworthy. Marlowe is dragged into a morass of moral degradation and corruption, but comes through clean, and naturally with a clear idea of who the villains are and what they did. It's not a black and white outcome - characters in Chandler's world are all portrayed in various rather murky shades of grey, and villainy is a relative thing, not an absolute.

It was written in 1939, and bears the hallmarks of its era - there's no sign of war or world politics, and the west-coast USA is a dangerous place, full of thugs, petty criminals, and former bootleggers. The language is delightful - partly Chandler's turn of phrase, but partly the slang of the era (obscure enough that some of it could have used explanatory footnotes).

I'm not normally a fan of detective novels, but it's worth wading into the genre just to soak in the sparse, hard beauty of Chandler's words and characters.