This is in response to Mike Bogle's post, One Perspective on Online Learning: Completing the Incomplete Cycle.

I have been following your blogging for quite some time, and I wanted to contribute my ideas to your conversation. I will re-post my comments into my own blog, too.
Your blogging has influenced how I have decided to blog on several occasions. Your ideas have influenced my focus several times. I wanted to thank you for blogging in the open. It has been of great benefit to me.

I have been extending the use of blogs for learning in various ways as I embrace it as an online tool (one of many) to engage in my own autonomous lifelong learning . It is just one perspective, but I am dissatisfied with the way blogs are being used to complement classroom instruction, rather than as a tool in itself, separate from classroom, face-to-face instruction.

I am wondering openly how the theoretical foundations upon which distance education is built makes innovative paradigm shifts so challenging. For example, the concepts of transactional distance, and teaching presence, are borrowed from how we place value on face-to-face instruction. We borrowed the benefits of F2F to compare online, and of course the online does not measure up. So attempts have been made to demonstrate that online learning has a place, has legitimacy, going so far as to engage many many hours of research and discussions and debates about the "no significance" phenonomen.

The challenge is to provide the training in the use of tools and the acquiring of skills and attitudes for individual learners to make better choices that benefit them, not the institutions that serve them.

We need to stop the ideology of just objectifying the learners. Stop just measuring observable outcomes. Stop just imposing standards and grades and tests.

A good part of my own significant learning has occurred outside traditional online instruction, outside LMSs, outside a cohort, outside a semester system. Instead, a good part of my significant learning occurred within a practice learning network. In one case, I was a member of a seminar, and worked cooperatively with others. In another case, I worked independently as an independent student, and met some former classmates and followed their blogs, forming an informal blogging circle. In yet another case, after graduation, I continued on blogging within that same practice network, as an autonomous learner, setting up my own groups, engaging in informal learning, inviting others to participate outside their traditioanl roles as learners and educators. Because, in the case of the academic blogging circle, everyone's contributions are welcome, they are free to read and browse the content, take a poll, leave a comment, or link to my blog posts.

The shift involves a recognition that I am ultimately responsible for my own learning, and responsible as a lifelong learner for negotiating with validators (not just the instructors of courses) within the various online learning spaces (more than one, not just the proscribed institutional LMS).