What do you think?
Rate this book
Empowering Online Learning: 100+ Activities for Reading, Reflecting, Displaying, and Doing
This is an essential resource for anyone designing or facilitating online learning. It introduces an easy, practical model (R2D2: read, reflect, display, and do) that will show online educators how to deliver content in ways that benefit all types of learners (visual, auditory, observational, and kinesthetic) from a wide variety of backgrounds and skill levels. With a solid theoretical foundation and concrete guidance and examples, this book can be used as a handy reference, a professional guidebook, or a course text. The authors intend for it to help online instructors and instructional designers as well as those contemplating such positions design, develop, and deliver learner-centered online instruction. Empowering Online Learning has 25 unique activities for each phase of the R2D2 model as well as summary tables helping you pick and choose what to use whenever you need it. Each activity lists a description, skills addressed, advice, variations, cost, risk, and time index, and much more. This title is loaded with current information about emerging technologies (e.g., simulations, podcasts, wikis, blogs) and the Web 2.0. With a useful model, more than 100 online activities, the latest information on emerging technologies, hundreds of quickly accessible Web resources, and relevance to all types and ages of learners-- Empowering Online Learning is a book whose time has come.
- GenresEducationNonfiction
320 pages, Paperback
First published July 21, 2008
5 people are currently reading
49 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 23, 2017
2.5 rounded up. eh, didn't really learn anything new. skimmed it really, reads more like a reference book.
August 15, 2020
I really want to like this book. I really looked forward to reading a book on online educational theory. Maybe my expectations were too high. I am disappointed in what looks like duplication (Bonk calls it overlap). There are subtle differences. A lot has changed in since this book was published more than a decade ago. It may have been cutting-edge in 2008. By 2020, many of the activities are common in online courses. I did gain some ideas, so it was not a waste of time.
In hindsight, I realize that a book that touts 100+ activities is going to resemble a reference book more than pedagogy. I was hoping for more creativity. Instead, Bonk and Zhang role out a framework, called R2D2 for Read, Reflect, Display, and Do. Into this framework they dump a variety of activities. Then they repackage them, seemingly repeatedly into each of the four categories: View a webpage, write an essay about viewing that webpage, recreate the same webpage, create the same webpage with your own interpretation and creativity. This basic repackaging occurs again and again. The repackaging is good. The authors display an awareness of the subtle distinctions.
Reading the book years after publication, a lot has changed. Many of the websites no longer exist, or moved. Tracking down documentation is a bit of trick. Bonk and Zhang are not generous in referencing their sources, unless the source is something else by Curtis Bonk. The result is a reference work that heavily draws on armchair scholarship. Comparing some of the key subject terms to modern databases will produce hits; but is a roundabout way of learning more. In other cases, such as discussion forums, the technology is about as common as chalk boards in F2F classes. It is strange to hear someone encourage readers to use discussion forums.
In terms of format, each activity was roughly 2-3 pages. Sometimes they were frustratingly vague. In one example, the authors comment on using popular movies for instruction. Their example, was Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark paired with engineering. Students can reflect on whether a bag of sand can be an adequate replacement for a gold statue. Huh? There has to be more. Later on, under "Do" activities, the authors casually drop content learning management (CMS) systems like Drupal. There is a huge learning curve here that is not passed on to the unwary reader. I suspect other activities include hidden difficulties.
Each activity includes Key Instructional Considerations. Whatever this means is only vaguely defined in the introduction. While reading some of the activities and then seeing it marked as "Risk Index: Medium, Time Index: Medium, Cost Index: Medium, Learner-centered index: Medium, and Duration of the Learning Activity: One week as needed" often made no sense to me. It would take considerable time to read, reflect, display, and do to understand these aspects of each activity.
Despite a generally negative review, the book is not bad. I did gain some ideas that I may be able to put into practice. The writing is clear even if the ideas are often cursory. Overall, I think this book is past its prime. It is out-dated, although some of the ideas, especially later sections of the book would be great to apply to classes....if the resources were available.
In hindsight, I realize that a book that touts 100+ activities is going to resemble a reference book more than pedagogy. I was hoping for more creativity. Instead, Bonk and Zhang role out a framework, called R2D2 for Read, Reflect, Display, and Do. Into this framework they dump a variety of activities. Then they repackage them, seemingly repeatedly into each of the four categories: View a webpage, write an essay about viewing that webpage, recreate the same webpage, create the same webpage with your own interpretation and creativity. This basic repackaging occurs again and again. The repackaging is good. The authors display an awareness of the subtle distinctions.
Reading the book years after publication, a lot has changed. Many of the websites no longer exist, or moved. Tracking down documentation is a bit of trick. Bonk and Zhang are not generous in referencing their sources, unless the source is something else by Curtis Bonk. The result is a reference work that heavily draws on armchair scholarship. Comparing some of the key subject terms to modern databases will produce hits; but is a roundabout way of learning more. In other cases, such as discussion forums, the technology is about as common as chalk boards in F2F classes. It is strange to hear someone encourage readers to use discussion forums.
In terms of format, each activity was roughly 2-3 pages. Sometimes they were frustratingly vague. In one example, the authors comment on using popular movies for instruction. Their example, was Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark paired with engineering. Students can reflect on whether a bag of sand can be an adequate replacement for a gold statue. Huh? There has to be more. Later on, under "Do" activities, the authors casually drop content learning management (CMS) systems like Drupal. There is a huge learning curve here that is not passed on to the unwary reader. I suspect other activities include hidden difficulties.
Each activity includes Key Instructional Considerations. Whatever this means is only vaguely defined in the introduction. While reading some of the activities and then seeing it marked as "Risk Index: Medium, Time Index: Medium, Cost Index: Medium, Learner-centered index: Medium, and Duration of the Learning Activity: One week as needed" often made no sense to me. It would take considerable time to read, reflect, display, and do to understand these aspects of each activity.
Despite a generally negative review, the book is not bad. I did gain some ideas that I may be able to put into practice. The writing is clear even if the ideas are often cursory. Overall, I think this book is past its prime. It is out-dated, although some of the ideas, especially later sections of the book would be great to apply to classes....if the resources were available.
Currently reading
February 1, 2010Good resource for faculty teaching online. Provides ideas for instructional activities.
June 9, 2012
Just ordered from amazon 2/6/10! Cost=$29.00
Received this book, so starting to read it-2/15/10!
Received this book, so starting to read it-2/15/10!
December 4, 2016
Filled with many ideas to incorporate technology into today's classroom or school library media center. Easy to understand and put into practice.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews