What did I learn on the internet? Well, honestly, it's hard to say. It's not that I didn't learn anything, far from it; I've learned a good deal. The thing that's hard to distill is what I got from the internet specifically, and just how "distanced" you could call that kind of learning. It has seemed to me over the last week and through the course of the semester that it's not all that different from learning from most other texts, so are we to differentiate between learning from the internet and learning from the texts it supports? Well anyway, I'm willing to abort this question for now, but it seems to be an interesting and perhaps relevant one.
My personal experiences with distance education have been few, indeed numbering only this class, and even that only half-way. actually, if I've learned anything about distance learning, it's that it really doesn't ork the way I expected it to. I cite the problems this class experienced in attempting to conduct a class dissussion in a chat room a couple of weeks ago as some strong evidence. The internet is a great place for independent research and learning, but it really doesn't work, at least in my experience, for communal learning. I'm really not sure why that is, particularly since there are so many opportunities for people to get together online....the dynamics just aren't the same.
Anyway, that's what I have to say right now; just some disorganized thoughts. I might come back and edit this later.