ABSTRACT
While it was made in 2002, the above statement is as true today as it was then-even though that span of time equates to an age in Internet time. In understanding Rossett’s nightmare scenario, the word ‘corridor’ may be the most informative. Grounded in an industrial model, described in Chapter 2, distance learning has had great difficulty freeing itself from the governing, linear paradigm that fails to differentiate between quantifiable training outcomes and the construction of knowledge. Complicating the evolution of eLearning is the rapid proliferation of new applications, communication modalities and competing visions of what the future of technological convergence will look like. However, despite issues revolving around the rapid pace of transformation, contemporary and emerging technologies provide practitioners to select from an array of tools that allow for coconstruction of knowledge as opposed to mere transmission of facts. The purpose of this chapter is thus twofold. Paralleling a review of where we have been and where we may be going is a discussion of the
underlying pedagogical possibilities of technologies that increasingly tie together the physical and virtual worlds.
