John Millner :: Blog :: E-activity critique

First things first: the letter string e-tivity is not a word. It is morphologically impossible and semantically meaningless. Tivity is not a unit of meaning in English, so e-tivity makes no more sense than, say, e-arning or e-vernment. In fact it is truly shocking that such a gross linguistic gaffe should have gained any currency among serious academics. So can we please agree to call them e-activities?

Second, while much of Salmon’s 5-stage e-activity model makes perfect sense, there is a problem (as Jones and Peachey discovered) with stage two – ‘online socialisation’. Socialisation is of course critical for the success of the other stages: information exchange, knowledge construction and development of new understanding. But socialisation cannot take place in a content vacuum, ‘sending and receiving messages’ that have nothing to do with the learning process. Socialisation in fact takes place in parallel with, and is part-and-parcel of, information exchange, knowledge construction etc, and continues as long as the e-activity itself continues.

So the 5 stage model should look more like this: