International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (Jun 2008)
Editorial ~ Ideas Whose Time has Come Back
Abstract
This issue of IRRODL contains papers from Brazil, Greece, Sri Lanka, Canada and the US, and reviews of distance education developments in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. A new world of distance education (DE) is coming together in the developing world, as old media such as radio and the telephone merge with each other and the Internet to form wholly original interactive partnerships. So I now offer you a new piece of jargon, coined to pay respect to the creative return to older DE media: ‘paradigm rollback’ – you heard it here first! This odious but quite typical piece of verbiage signifies “a shift back to an idea whose time has come,” as in the case of DE technologies supplanted for a while by the promise that the Internet would do the job better. I just looked the term up on Google, and find only one reference to it so far – in the conference presentation where I coined the term a week ago! Let’s see how many references there are to ‘paradigm rollback’ a few months from now among those for whom jargon is all . . .
