Pierre Dillenbourg’s cautions…

Attended an eLRC workshop at Manchester University – ‘Mapping the Landscape’.  Some interesting sessions, though structure was fuzzy.  But a quite inspirational plenary by Pierre Dillenbourg, Professeur de pédagogie et nouvelles technologies de formation at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.  He was talking about the potential of both theory and technology to fuse in the service of learning (he’s through with e-learning).  Excellent discussion of CSCL, including exchangeable objects, spatialized interaction & collaborative artefacts. 

After the inspiration, the warning.  His summing up of the second day of the workshop was a caution to us all in the field of learning & technology:

Dillenbourg’s 7 mistakes, or how to lose credibility

  1. theory abuse. 
  2. politeness – a cultural disease
  3. collective amnesia of our discipline
  4. the new-ish stuff: the new paradigm, eg the mobile bullshit
  5. we promise too much
  6. sustainability: all the money we got for research, where are the results now?
  7. confusion between applied research and blue-skies research: what are we doing and why?

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