Link: http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/review/moodle-and-social-constructionism

From one of my favorite blogs, Academic Commons, a thoughtful posting by Luke Fernandez about the social implications of using Moodle:

In “learning to be” a social or behavioral scientist or a humanist, one needs to learn to like spending a couple of years (if not a couple of decades) holed up alone in a library carrel or in the midst of musty archives. Digital learners might want to dismiss these solitary and reflective traditions, but they are the way a lot of important scholarship has been produced and will continue to be produced for years to come. If Moodle serves to forward social constructionist pedagogical practices, I hope that a good deployment can also make some accommodations for the more solitary type of learning. It’s fine to coordinate and connect autonomous scholars on campus and to celebrate collaboration and communitarianism. But one shouldn’t lose sight of the virtues inherent in individualism and more solitary forms of scholarship.