ITC Grand Debate - Suggestions Needed

The ITC Grand Debate is held each year at the organization’s eLearning conference. The 2010 conference will be held from February 20-23 in Fort Worth, Texas at the Omni Hotel. Last year I was a participant in the Grand Debate titled “Virtual Worlds are the Second Life for Online Learning.” That event has been well chronicled and I don’t care to discuss it more at this time. The purpose for this post is to solicit a few topic ideas for the 2010 Grand Debate.

The ITC Board of Directors meets later this week in California and we will choose the debate topics (and hopefully the debaters as well) for the next conference. A couple of the previous topics included: “Classroom Observation is an Administrator’s Right” (2008), “Cheating is Rampant in Distance Education Classes” (2007), and Open Source vs. Proprietary Course Management: Is Proprietary Software Dead?” (2006).

Through a couple of tweets I received the following suggestions about two weeks ago.
  • Generations: Net Gen Skeptics vs. Net Gen Evangelists. Statement: “Digital as a first language changes everything about how to teach the Net Generation.” (suggested by @cmduke)
  • LMS versus PLE (or distributed sources) – Statement: “An LMS is no longer useful in a Web 2.0 world.” Or “An LMS is even more critical and useful in a Web 2.0 world.” (suggested by @dietsociety)
  • eLearning vs. ITV
  • Multiple learning styles. Statement: Through online learning we are able to adequately deal with groups of learners possessing different learning styles.
  • Online learning enables meaningful and effective individualized instruction. (suggested by @brueckj23)
Please leave a comment to this post of you have one more possible debate topics for the group to consider. It should be relevant to an eLearning audience (for example, I question whether a topic about ITV courses is relevant as we go forward), it should have two good sides that can be argued strongly, and we need to have some ideas about who could make those arguments during the debate. Thanks in advance!!
(CC photo by hive)

Comments

Goamick said…
sorry I do not have additional suggestions but would vote for LMS vs PLE, that is the best one so far.
July 27, 2009 4:12 PM
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