Week 4 Just keeping track of ideas for Thursday night's discussion.

It seems like we have been talking a lot about learners and how they learn. With online learning, there is a new emphasis on collaborative learning that was not a part of the online learning of a few years ago. I took a class from the University of Iowa in 1998 that had a distance component. There was no collaborative learning at all. I have always preferred to work on my own. I am old enough that when I was in school, group work was rare and mainly used to put underachievers with high achievers so the former could actually pass. At least that is what it seemed like. This class is quite a turn around for me. I am on unexplored territory. I have studied learning theories, but it seems as if we are coming up with new paradigms for online learners. Technology has not only had an effect on learners, but on learning as well. I know I struggled for the last year to bring my own technology skills up to an acceptable level. It still feels like something I put on rather than being a natural part of me to find things on my computer, to make posts on my blog ( which I still do only as part of an IM assignment). I am a chalkboard person in a Smart board world.