No anecdotes to begin with, but one crossed my mind during reading, see below. Actually, this whole debate is new to me. Obviously did not make it into the 'practitioners' literature . 

Dreyfus, H.L. (2001), On the Internet, chapter 2, 'How Far is Distance Learning from Education'

(Unfortunately, the e-book version is crippled with DRM, can only be downloaded for one day and the pdf version wants to connect to the publisher's site, so not fit for downloading to my Sony wifi-less e-reader, and anyway, I seem to be without internet in this tiny fishermen's village on the east coast of beautiful Fuerteventura, Canary Islands.)

Some general thoughts after going over Dreyfus' text twice.

Dreyfus uses a trick generally in use with American writers to kick off his discussion: choose a few hilarious, maybe even ridiculous quotes to oppose against. This goes for the Perelman quote opening the chapter and the Reed Hundt quotes discussed during the opening pages. There is also an opening quote by Agre which could be seen as supportive to Dreyfus' argument. Yet, Twigg (Carol A. Twigg (2001), Innovations in online learning. Moving beyond no significant difference, Center for Academic Transformation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, http://www.center.rpi.edu/pewsym/Mono4.pdf (link broken - October 12, 2010), and Carol A. Twigg (2003), Improving learning and reducing costs: lessons learned from round I of the Pew Grant Program in course redesign, Center for Academic Transformation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, http://www.center.rpi.edu/PewGrant/Rd1intro.pdf (link broken - October 12, 2010)) has made the same observation and turns the point into favour of e-learning. Her argument is that when you add technology to an otherwise unchanged educational concept, the technology will only be 'added to'. Cuban makes a similar point (Larry Cuban (2001), Oversold and underused. Computers in the classoom, Harvard University Press), technology has not changed anything in schools (how could it, by itself?). Twigg argues for redesign of education in order to make technology work.

Dreyfus also uses another rhetorical trick: complete opposition of distance learning vs education, and so forces us into an either / or mode of thinking which is not very helpful when it comes to understanding the dynamics of both modes of learning, let alone how one mode could complement the other.

Throughout the text Dreyfus maintains the premise that distance learning can only 'pass on information'. Which is an extremely limited view.

The seven stage model seems an attractive way of viewing education as a process through which students evolve. Yet the model has a few shortcomings:

• It's way to generalized. Of course I would not undergo surgery from a student who comes fresh out of a distance learning course in surgery, but many skills can be learned that do not ask for going through expensive apprenticeship models. Dreyfus sort of admits this when he says that distance learning can get you to stage three, competence. The examples that he chooses in the advanced stages 5 and 6 -- he does not mention car driving in stage 6 any more, by the way -- suggest that these describe graduate and postgraduate levels, a stage that is simply not relevant for the majority of the world's workforce.
• Stage 7 does not seem to fit in the model of ever progressing, but might just as well be stage 0.
• Throughout the stages model, emotions are connected to embodiment. While I think that emotions are crucial in learning (learning should at the very least be fun, in my view), these emotions can also be experienced when learning alone: the joy of having read a good novel; the joy of solving a mathematical problem; the joy of solving a sudoku puzzle without ever having learned anything formally about the puzzle; the joy of developing scenarios for strategic development. One can add many examples.

Page by page remarks.

p. 30. 'What proposed change in the <<method of education>> generates all the excitement?' Exactly, see the remark about Twigg's work above.

p. 32. Ends with the question whether the stages model can be 'implemented and encouraged on the Web?' So the stages model is pertinent to the whole argument. Of course, one can question the limits of the model. For some reason the model also reminds me of the whole concept of levels that we find in so many computer games.

p. 37 'If we were disembodied beings, pure minds free of our messy emotions, our responses to our successes and failures would lack this seriousness and excitement.' Well, we are not disembodied beings, are we? Emotions might show easier in groups, relations, but we also have emotions when we are alone, don't we? How good can it feel to master another level in a computer game you're playing alone?

p. 38 introduces imitation as a way of learning. Usually imitation is seen as a very early stage of learning, here it is introduced in stage three, competence, curious.

p. 39 'at home in front of his or her terminal, there is no place for such risky involvement'. Yes, if learning would be simply passing on information. No, if there is real feedback from either a tutor or from fellow students. This line of thinking is repeated on the same page where Dreyfus talks about anonymous students without a 'class before which the student can shine and also risk making a fool of himself'. Yet a little but further he seems to remark that online environments can be 'much less intimidating'.

Also p. 39, Dreyfus finishes the stage 3 discussion with the remark that 'the absence of face to face learning - may well leave students stuck at competence'. For many students, and maybe for many professions this might be more than enough.

p. 40 'positive and negative emotional experiences will strengthen successful responses and inhibit unsuccessful ones', somehow this reminds me of Skinner.

The whole stage 4 discussion does not seem to discuss the classroom experience, which I find very odd. So, could we conclude that stage 4 can also be reached in absence of face to face?

p. 43 about learning by watching reminded me of John Seely Brown's et. al. latest book The Power of Pull. It tells the story of kids on Hawaii learning how to surf in the absence of teachers. They shoot videos of themselves while surfing and in the evening watch and discuss these videos together. These kids made it into the professional surfing circuits. And this reminded me again of TVI where a class of students watch a canned lecture and every now and then stop the tape to discuss the lecture. Very embodied, again, as in the surfers example, but the absence of a teacher in both examples seems to add, rather than subtract from the learning experience.

p. 44 about teaching assistants picking up their teacher's style: I question that.

p. 46 When it introduces practical wisdom it reminded me of Prensky's digital wisdom. And later in the discussion of that stage it occurred to me that online communities develop a culture of their own, however disembodied that culture might be.

p. 47 On the issue of disintermediating universities I need to check Brown and Duguid's The Social Life of Information where they discuss this issue in one of the final chapters. As to the question: 'can the bodily presence required for acquiring skills in various domains and for acquiring mastery of one's culture be delivered by means of the Internet?', my answer would be it depends when it comes to skills, not sure about the culture mastery part.

And in the end, it's all bodies behind terminals anyway. I do need to follow up on the Twigg reference. Her point is that convential, today's university education is essentially a standardized product, from the student's point of view, whereas e-learning could offer the option of more flexible offerings, accommodating different learning styles.

Yet another anecdote to round this Dfreyfus reading of. I once got into an argument on a Dutch usenet group devoted to power kites. Something I had written was completely misinterpreted and a flame war was about to ensue. I countered with the argument that on fields where kiters meet the atmosphere was much more friendly and helpful (culture on and offline compared). We, that's me, my wife, and the guy I got into an argument with, ended up writing a (web) manual for a power kite design program developed by a Canadian together, a short version of that manual was even published in a Dutch printed kite magazine, truly amazing. Even more amazing, we never met f2f. I am, sure I learned a lot about kite design in the process -- okay, maybe to the level of advanced beginner, but still. And I learned about how cultural norms can be set either on and offline.

Burbules, N. (2002) 'Like a version: playing with online identities', Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 387 - 393

Nice play on the Madonna song, the title, although the article really doesn't go all that deep into the identity thing as the title seems to make one to expect.

Obviously there is much more nuance to Dreyfus' book than was obvious from chapter 2 alone. Burbules has the same observations about the rhetorical style of Dreyfus that I had.

p. 388 'We need to raise the level of discussion by framing it in new terms.' Somehow I have the feeling Burbules does not achieve this goal. My own take is that this whole talk about embodiedness is just not very helpful to understand what's going, and what could be going on in online learning / e-learning, the same feeling I had about the whole net generation discussion in the week before. And hey:

p. 389 'Indeed, it's arguable that the Internet can foster and support modes of pedagogy that are more engaging, more intellectually stimulating, and foster more teacher-student interaction than the actual experience in many existing educational institutions.'

p. 390 echoes my earlier observation: 'for many students and subject matters, why is competence not adequate?' I'd like to add the observation that Burbules does not even question the whole validity of the seven stages model. On the same page, I like the following sentence: 'So now we arrive at the interesting questions: Where and how can these technologies be used to support particular educational purposes, and where can they not be?' Pretty much sums up my expectation for the MScEL program.

p. 391, the quote from Dreyfus about trust near the end of the page strikes me as completely weird. You have to remember that terms like 'trust' and also 'disintermediation' were used quite heavily ten years ago in debates about the merits of the internet / the web when compared to how things were done before the advent of those technologies.

p. 392 in the Dreyfus quote: 'If our body goes, so does relevance, skill, reality, and meaning.' It made me want to shout at Dreyfus: But the body does not go at all! I don't recognize this whole idea about disembodiedness. For the past five years the technology enabled me to stay in touch with my 400 kilometers away family, to do job interviews with people across the ocean, and I could give more examples. It just adds to the options we have of interacting with people. What does it add when it comes to education?