Wedding Songs Gone Wrong

Is it blended, or just mixed up? By David Goodrich.

Are there any weddings that don’t have music? I know I have never experienced one. In fact, even to imagine it is frankly both creepy and lame at the same time. Every wedding has music.

In fact, my wedding had music in it that my soon-to-be wife and I both wrote and performed in our wedding. Booya. Take that, Adam Sandler. We also had carefully chosen songs that my best man and his wife performed on an acoustic guitar and violin.

What I am getting at here, while sounding like I am just talking myself up, is that most people don’t just pick music at random for weddings. Often times music is even performed by members of the wedding party or families and friends. This is because there is importance put on this day and because meaning is weaved through the planning of the whole wedding experience.

I like to think of blended learning in the same way. Blended learning isn’t just throwing random online resources at students or throwing aspects of an existing course up on the internet. This would be just as haphazard and outrageous as a wedding planner who planned the wedding music to be whatever mix was on any radio station at a fluky tuning of the dial. I like how Dean Jenkins (@Dean_Jenkins) refers to unthoughtful and unplanned blended learning as mixed learning instead on his blog post about the five sloppy uses of the term “blended.”

As mentioned previously on this blog, we relate with many who struggle to find a common consensus on defining what blended learning is concretely. It makes it difficult to do this when blended learning has so many different models and forms for many unique contexts. Dean did a nice job of helping us decipher what blended learning is not. Similarly, I think Mark Belles (@markbelles) does a good job here of concisely guiding us to consider carefully constructed definitions of what blended learning truly is.

How do you define blended learning? What differentiates your practice of blended learning from that of mixed learning? Do you observe mixed learning inaccurately being labeled as blended learning?