Let's look at two digital media that seem modern: the PowerPoint and the Flipped Classroom. Just because they are digital we think they are an advance, but much of they time just preserve the didactic aspects of the lecture. (Now, we are not wanting to say, abandon your PowerPoints, because they can be well done and are very convenient, and recording video lectures can have lots of advantages over having students sitting through in-person lectures.) But ...

1. Death by PowerPoint

We could never say this as eloquently as Edward R. Tufte, the PowerPoint slide deck as co-conspirator in relentless telling and excruciatingly boring listening. You can purchase his very entertaining short book (just 32 pages) on the web. You can also find bootlegged PDFs quite easily, if you don't mind conspiring with the web to defeat the spirit of copyright.

In our Scholar learning communities, we rarely if ever see learners using PowerPoints. If they are presenting online or presenting in person, they talk to their update in Community or the their published work from Creator. This can be on the screen of online meeting or in the physical room, or both, and other learners can scroll ahead, scroll forward, and read while they are listening. This is not a bullet-point synoptic text (how painful it is when you read the whole of slide, and the speaker is only up to dot point 2!). It is the whole text. There is more space for engagement while the creator is speaking.

2. The Flipped Classroom

Of course, it's great that students can access lectures at any time. Or watch them several times until they understand a point. Or pause, or fast forward, or watch at 2x speed ... But a video lecture is still a lecture. It's St Benedict only slightly updated. The speaker speaks, the listener obediently listens. Here's some of the good and bad of the flipped classroom, and you'll find more here.

We can do a version of the flipped classroom in Scholar, but we do it quite differently. We like to say that we do it dialogically. Have a look at our e-Learning Ecologies Learning Module (which, by the way, we also offer in Coursera). We have lots of video mini-lectures, but they prompt dialogue (the "comment" request at the end of each update), and ask the participants to illustrate the idea with their own content, and to share (the "post an update" request).

Comment: New educational media, when are they new wine in old bottles? How big are these changes?