TITLE:
Is Blended Learning Making Us Stupid, Too?
AUTHORS:
Ray Archee
KEYWORDS:
Blended Learning, Online Learning, E-Learning, Traditional Learning, Teaching
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.3 No.9,
September
18,
2015
ABSTRACT: The title of this paper echoes Nicholas
Carr’s (2008) article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, which evoked heated debate
around the issue of whether the Internet was having negative effects upon human
concentration and learning. While this paper agrees that blended learning has
the same issues as the Internet, blended learning is under the control of
organizations, institutions, instructors and students. Whether our brains are
being changed for better or worse is not the critical question, but how much
confidence we ascribe to blended learning. This paper argues that blended
learning should be regarded as blended teaching because the phrase comprises a
contested assumption. Educators, by their selection of traditional and online
media, have complete control over this teaching, but students, in the end, are
the ultimate arbiters of their own learning.