What's Cool
- Nikki
What's Not Cool
Lynda.com's interface limits its adaptability to new learning opportunities that may have otherwise been seized in a classroom. Rosen writes, "Technology cannot and never should replace curriculum or content. The curriculum should drive the technology use, rather than allowing the technology to dictate the curriculum" (Rosen 214). Lynda.com's technology definitely limits it's effectiveness to learn material quickly and completely. The training videos are numbered into consecutive chapters. Also, videos by nature are linear forms of communication. This linear sequence of administering information can put a hold on spontaneous questions that will arrise about other facets of the particular software one was learning. (For instance, you may not know why you are unable to select something by simply clicking on it.) When questions do arrise, finding the solution soon is key to connecting the material for memory. I suppose someone could search for their answers by simply glancing the various chapter titles, but in many events, the user will not know what what the particular keywords are for their specific troubleshoot. Rosen continues to write that, "Learning environments should allow for teachers to interrupt students, for students to interrupt other students, even for students to interrups teachers when appropriate."
You cannot merely watch the videos to learn the material. Nicholas Carr draws on Eric Kandel, a Nobel Prize winning neuropsychiatrist, for insight into the process of memory. "For memory to persist, ... the incoming information must be thouroughly and deeply processed. This is accomplished by attending to the information and associating its meaning fully and systematically with knowledge already in well established memory." (Carr 193) Therefore, you cannot expect to retain the software tools learned from Lynda.com in your memory, unless you are able to connect it with previous experience and are able to understand its applications.
The videos are very long, and many users do feel very bored while watching multiple videos that each could be as lengthy as ten minutes. Rosen writes "[Online courses] are too static of an environment for an entire course" because of the lack of socialization and the lack of multiple learning modalities (Rosen 220). Being trapped in headphones and listening to a monotonous voice speak for extended periods of time can be very uninteresting. Distractions (especially social ones that this technology isolates us from) will creep in and cause for interrupted learning. Perhaps Lynda could use more immediate positive reinforcement and interaction, like that of playing a video game. In the books, Rewired and Rethinking Education, both agree that online courses could have a lot to learn from video games (Rosen 49) (Collins & Halverson 84) . While Lynda.com does allow you to download exercise files to work along the training video, this service comes at an additional cost. Even if you use the exercise files, being forced to stop what you are thinking to repause and replay the videos over and over again is not the ideal way operate a web browser which will inhibit the seamless learning workflow that educational environments strive for.
- Steven
