CONIECTO

Great story in the eLearn Magazine of the ACM:

First there is emotion; after that comes cognition, explains Frank Thissen, Professor for Multimedia Didactics and Intercultural Communication at the University of Applied Sciences in Stuttgart, Germany.

A great instructor touches the students emotionally, says Allison Rossett, long time professor of Educational Technology at San Diego State University. He or she grabs them, not just in the mind, but in the belly.

I was always of the same opinion, that you cannot learn unless you are emotionally involved in learning. You always learn from people you admire, because deep inside your soul, you would love to be like them. And this proves to be a strong motivation!

At the first sight, e-learning is not suitable for being emotionally involved. But this is not true!
The net makes possible that each individual picks up his learning sources, his subject, his tutor.
I'm not sure if for adult learning, formal courses are still needed.

The main thing you have to learn is how to search for your sources. How to guide your own endeavour. How to find your own pace. The rest will come naturally.

And here comes my BlogTalk paper idea: Learning from blogs with blogs

For me, in the last year, it proved to be the best way of learning.

You can pick up your teachers as you like.
You can find people sharing your interests, no matter on what part of the planet they live, and no matter how narrow your niche is. You read and write and get feedback - and you can't do this without committment, without being emmotionally involved. Nobody is forcing you to do it. You can always do it your way. Accumulating knowledge, sharing it and creating new knowledge becomes more like a game! And in the process, you interact with others, you network, you grow. New ideas are born in the interaction.

We're sitting in a cubicle and we are typing on a keyboard, yes, this is how things are, but we are connected to the whole world. We belong to several networks, we're passing information from one to another, and we are constantly learning.
This makes me feel free. This makes me think I will never grow old, because I have the chance to keep on learning. I can't imagine myself ever being bored of learning!

Can we find a way so that everyone could enjoy e-learning?! Make it funny and interesting for everyone?
More or less, this is what Montessori and Waldorf schools do. Give the students the choice of what do they want to do, when, and how. Could e-tutors behave like this? What must an individual know and feel before he or she will have the desire to learn like this?