Click picture to enlarge
In 1992, before the Web, before the likes of you and I had email, in the days when a 2400 baud modem costing £300 in today's money felt like a terrific deal, when people not in big companies or universities could only connect to each other by dialing at great expense into a BT-run "point of presence", I was lucky to run a TUC project that investigated the use of computer conferencing in distance learning.
The project involved making and running an on-line distance course (about the EU, oh joy!) for union representatives in Denmark, Sweden and the UK, and then assessing the impact. The design of the course was much influenced by my reading of work by Robin Mason, who died on Monday, and who 12 years later I got to know through her involvement as a trustee of ALT and as Chair of our Research Committee.
Today, prompted by discussion about Robin's contribution, I dug out a box file in my attic with some stuff from the project. I was particularly struck by the piece above by a learner, that I used in an overhead projector transparency for a talk I gave at the time.
For a pretty astonishing mixture of views about Robin, here is the Memorial Page on the OU's web site.
Seb - this is stunningly brilliant - true all those years ago and still the case to-day - after over ten years of online tutoring, I am still amazed at the equality and accessibility of it all - Dave
Posted by: Dave Pickersgill | 24/06/2009 at 09:49
Totally agree - allows even the shyest of students to have an on-line voice and gives freedom to students to read and post in an "any time, anywhere, any place" environment - even with a glass of Martini in hand! It also allows students to reflect on what has been said and of course, proof-read their own messages before clicking the "send" button. I love it!
Posted by: Susan Murad | 29/06/2009 at 06:40
Fascinating that you had a printout of what looks like a "cafe" screen on a computer conferencing system circa 1992 - the year that FirstClass was installed at the OU. It was said in OU FirstClass circles that Tone Hasemer (also now dead) was the inventor of the "cafe" concept (used certainly for XT001 and I seem to recall even earlier - http://earthconnected.net/papers/icde.htm) and thus in many ways of the "social networking" extension of pedagogy that the screen shows. Mind you, the benefits stated correlate with the hypotheses of Harasim, Cross etc prevalent in the later 1980s. All of which to me adds to the poignancy of the screen rather than detracts from it.
Posted by: bacsich | 29/06/2009 at 16:48