Oxford's Great eLearning Students

Just come across a posting from Curtis Bonk about his visit here back in January this year. What an extraordinary man he is! Never stands still, it seems - his blog is called TravelinEdMan, and I guess that does sort of convey his fairly driven approach to spreading the word about blended learning round the world (sort of like Bob Dylan's Neverending Tour, but without the croaking). Curt's talks are insane - cuddly toys, t-shirts, million dollar bills flying all over the place - and just more information than any normal human can absorb in one sitting. But some great stuff: his survey on corporate training in 5 countries--UK, USA, China, Taiwan, and Korea-- is sharp and revealing (you can find it in his Handbook on Blended Learning): especially about what turn out to be major national differences that raise important questions about the realities of globalism. And I love the way he persuades everyone he meets to contribute to his work. As research goes, it is kind of quick and dirty - but it's also really compelling, and he pulls stuff off that more bureaucratic approaches to research could probably never achieve.

What I liked best, though, when I read his posting about that visit just now, is what he wrote about our MSc eLearning students that he met here in Oxford. I couldn't have put it better myself, and it perfectly captures why it is so endlessly rewarding to work with them:

"It is always a delight to present at Oxford. The students have a contagious energy related to research on e-learning. We had students in the audience from Nepal, Taiwan, China, Korea, the UK, and other places. Very enthusiastic people and a lovely setting to speak in!"

Well, you can add Jordan, Pakistan, Denmark, Greece, Turkey, the USA, Azerbaijan and Armenia to that list too, Curt. And every single one of them that turns up here ends up teaching the rest of us something amazing and new about what learning means in their part of the world, and about how technology might or might not be able to help.

I Love Science Fiction

I always loved science fiction, since I was a kid. Started with Dan Dare and devoured all I could find. I would read John Wyndham over and over, specially "The Seeds of Time": robots, time travel, great ideas even if the writing was a bit naff. I never went for the intergalactic sagas: what I loved was the way some science fiction can turn the old world we know inside out, and make the old things new and exciting, and different. 50s sci-fi movies were great at doing that - the extraordinary Incredible Shrinking Man, The Man with X-Ray Eyes, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I loved the long-lost American science fiction comics that worried adults so much, but which had some brilliant ideas. My favourite was a story about how our universe turns out to be just an exhibit in a science museum in someone else's universe. Someone is bending down to see the final implosion of galaxies, and saying: it's so good, it's almost real.

There was a great BBC play too, in the late sixties or early seventies, where someone kept waking up to find the same day happening all over again (hey! there's a great idea for a movie) and discovering that his whole life was just the fabrication of marketing executives, who had constructed a sort of toy new town (whose toy inhabitants had painfully real feelings) trying out new products on them. And of course there was all that other sixties stuff: StarTrek, Vonnegut and the crazy and entirely fictional Kilgore Trout, and 2001 of course, which made us all fall in love with the idea of artificial intelligence. I loved it all: science fiction was sort of like using science to create dreamworlds you could control, with all dreaming's ambiguities of the mundane and the crazy going on at once. I tried to dream it myself, and wrote a whole science fiction novel, which did achieve certain characteristics of being a cult classic. Such as being read by about four people, then incinerated.

As time went on, I did get a bit bored with the science fiction novels and the big overblown movies. But I didn't get bored with the idea of science helping us to fictionalise our lives - at least, helping us create amazing new narratives, which turn out to be real in ways I never imagined when I loved this stuff as a kid. As the very wonderful Paleo-Future shows us time and time again: people are always imagining different kinds of bright new future, but nobody ever gets it quite right.

It's great to be living in a time when the change starts to happen faster than you can imagine. And we don't need novelists or scientists to do it for us: the world is being changed by the audience.