Online Learning

Tony Wilson and Huey Pyng Tan in Less Tangible Ways of Reading state that their thesis is “that this process of Internet-mediated meaning construction/consumption is seriously ‘play-full’.” (Wilson and Tan, p.397) It is this play-full element that allows us to explore and create in a conducive environment. Ludic, they call it. “The screen’s immediacy or ‘liveness’ attracts an audience’s attention, absorbing them in a ‘playable’… environment in cyberspace.” (Wilson et. al., p.525)

The internet is built to play on. A click here, a click there. Open a new window and play a quick game of text twist, while reading articles in the Human Computer Interaction Journal and checking your email. Like a bee, we flit from page to page, site to site, information to narrative to entertainment. This allows for a different type of thought pattern, a different way of learning and understanding information with both positive and negative effects. “Mid-narrative hypertext links on a web page inviting 'travel' to other items can mean stories being half-read, a cursory attention to content. Readers lose interest in the accuracy of anticipated outcomes, in their projections of narrative development:” (Wilson and Tan, p.403)

Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s understood then that the way we learn needs to change along with the technology. “Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery – to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.” (McLuhan, p.100) The need to go out and discover, learning along the way during the journey is more fruitful than memorising and learning by rote.