My interest lies in understanding how the facilitation of learning that occurs entirely or partially online can be designed to foster the reflective capacities of professionals as a means of informing and improving practice.
I am motivated by a construct of learning that responds to Donald Schon's acknowledgement of the conundrum of the learning experience:
"The paradox of learning a really new competence is this: that a student cannot at first understand what he needs to learn, can learn it only by educating himself, and can educate himself only by beginning to do what he does not yet understand." (Educating the Reflective Practitioner)
I believe that the online learning environment can and should provide powerful solutions to this inherent dilemma, in part through deep understanding and effective use of the dynamics of facilitating the communication processes unique to this medium.
Additionally, there is a great deal of 'embedded' knowledge generated in online learning settings that can serve as an important component of broadly distributed knowledge management processes. The written record creates a body of explicit knowledge and tangible learning objects that may be captured, archived and reused in creative and valuable ways. One of the things I want to explore is how weblogging can be used to maximize and enhance the dimensionality and transferability of knowledge that develops within the online learning environment.
12:27:22 PM 
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