My presentation slides for my Spotlight Session at the 34th Distance Teaching & Learning Conference, at Wisconsin Madison, August 2018. Appropriately enough, I won't be there in person, but will be presenting online to a mixed in-person and online audience.

The talk is concerned with how online learning is fundamentally different from in-person learning, and what that means for how (or even whether) we teach, in the traditional formal sense of the word. Teaching is always a gestalt process, an emergent consequence of the actions of many teachers, including most notably the learners themselves. This deeply distributed process is often masked by the inevitable (thanks to physics in traditional classrooms) dominance of an individual teacher in the process. Online, the mask falls off. Learners invariably have both far greater control and far more connection with the distributed gestalt. This is great, unless institutional teachers fight against it with rewards and punishments, in a pointless and counter-productive effort to try to sustain the level of control that is almost effortlessly attained by traditional in-person teachers, and that is a consequence of solving problems caused by physical classroom needs, not of the needs of learners.

The talk concludes with some broad characterization of what is different when teachers choose to let go of that control.  I observe that what might have been Leonardo da Vinci's greatest creation was his effective learning process, without which none of the rest of his creations could have happened. I am hopeful that now, thanks to the connected world that we live in, we can all learn like Leonardo, as long as teachers can learn to let go.