An information systems (IS) function supporting people taking purposeful action. This is often done by indicating that the purposeful action can itself be expressed via activity models, a fundamental re-thinking of what is entailed in providing informational support to purposeful action. The idea is that in order to conceptualize, and so create an IS support which serves, it is first necessary to conceptualize that which is served, since the way the latter is thought of will dictate what would be necessary to serve or support it.
Published in Chapter:
An E-Portfolio Scheme of Flexible Online Learning
Kam Hou Vat (University of Macau, Macau)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 9
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-198-8.ch132
Abstract
The potentialities of the information (or Internet) age have somehow exceeded many of our current calculations in education (Brown, 2000; Cornford & Pollock, 2003; Duke, 2002). Imagine a student attending a class waiting to be taught mostly in lectures or direct training from the instructor. The same student as a learner has at hand many an on-demand (or just-in-time) ubiquitous high-quality learning environments with learner-friendly support, such as the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia. org). Today’s numerous virtual communities, including the WELL project (http://www.well.com) or the Blacksburg community networks (http://www.bev.net), have demonstrated to our inquiring students the possibility of fostering their own learning initiatives, with the comfort of an electronic personalized space in the form of customizable information system (IS) support (Vat, 2005) guarded by privately assigned identifier and password, to experience and make sense of their worlds of learning. The message to the education community is clear: we need to inject more flexibility (Khan, 2007a) in support of learning; namely, learners now must be empowered with more say in what they learn, when they learn, and where and how they learn.