Quick reflections

A too-brief follow-on to the previous post:

  • I would much rather see learning objects in a container like David Wiley’s course than in any CMS (I refuse to call them LMS’s–just my little gesture of protest) I’ve ever seen, for all the reasons everyone’s pointed out.
  • That said, I am still not enthusiastic about the “content” and “resources” I’m seeing here. I wish I were more excited. Four years ago I probably would have been. And yes, I understand that incrementalism is valuable, and that taken together the elements here constitute a significant advance. I suppose I’m wishing the steps had been taken in a different direction.
  • I see that the course feeds out. But what feeds in to this course?
  • Honestly, for resources that simply feed out, I’d much rather listen to a podcast of a really good lecture, or even a YouTube video of a great presentation, than see a set of links or an outline of a lesson. The links and the lesson are valuable, too, and I’d much rather see them exposed like this than sitting behind a Blackweb wall. But it’s the human context that I want to see, hear, experience.
  • Maybe it’s the word “content” that gets me restive. I want to see content that’s more responsive to the medium. And I don’t think that such content necessarily replaces books, or essays, or any of the things we experience in schooling now. I think the digital medium, and the digital imagination, moves us off default positions and into a much more intelligent place from which to choose and craft the experiences we want to lead our students through–and to equip them to choose and craft those experiences for themselves. (Both are necessary, in my view–but I’ve written about my concerns about a completely learner-centered paradigm before.)
  • As I understand it, learning objects did not really catch on for precisely this reason: a resource without a rich context is difficult to adopt, and not terribly attractive to a faculty member who rightly or wrongly believes that she or he is being paid to develop materials reflecting her or his own expertise and judgment.

Most of all:

I’m still finding my way with all this stuff myself. But I have a strong sense that we need to get to Alan Kay’s vision of the computer as an instrument whose music is ideas, and I don’t see this paradigm getting us closer. I could be wrong. Help me understand! It pains me to think that any part of the conversation would turn bitter.

3 thoughts on “Quick reflections

  1. I’m not prone (nor typically able) to quote Shakespeare, yet his words seem apt here:

    “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

    My question for you is whether you think the music is being made already and if so where is it happening? If not, would it be the technology that empowers or something else?

    Most of the faculty I know are rather senior. They’ve taken up technology a bit but keep their distance on much of what is currently happening. Perhaps a bad metaphor, but they’ve done PowerPoint, the CMS, and perhaps something else – yet still no music. Three strikes and you’re out.

  2. Hello, Gardner,

    First off, I want to thank you — your recent posts have helped me clarify some of my thoughts on the relationship between Open Content and effective use of a social learning environment —

    I’m still thinking about some of these things, and, time permitting, will get together a blog post about it at some point. But here are some quick thoughts —

    Like you, I’m also somewhat underwhelmed by the open content currently available. It’s difficult to recontextualize, and seems to me more of a textbook online than a reimagining of what learning could be.

    So we take an example like what David Wiley did, or what Jim did — I actually prefer Jim’s version, Jim brought in the curriculum as blog posts, which subsequently allowed them to be exported from the site via rss.

    This creates the planning repository, where the instructor can “develop materials reflecting her or his own expertise and judgment.”

    This planning repository (ie, the remixed/somewhat contextualized version) of the original content is a starting point. Unfortunately, I get the sense that most people see it as the end game.

    And this is where the paradigm shift kicks in. I see a class, or learning, as a swirl of connections between people and ideas. In response to your question, “But what feeds in to this course?” — in the right environment, anything you want. And I mean *anything*. If your initial curriculum lives in a site that allows students to add feeds, pointers to resources (either within the site, or coming from external resources like delicious, flickr, youtube, etc) the possibilities are fairly broad.

    And this is the resource that interests me — the notion of a learning space that allows students to connect with other learners, and allows people to discuss ideas, and those ideas in turn spawn future discussions. In this learning context, the curriculum is a point of reference, but not the yardstick against which learning is measured.

    The notion of a learning object doesn’t really fit within this context, and, in many ways, it never really fit within a progressive educational paradigm:

    “How was school today, son?”
    “Great. I digested four learning objects. And no acid reflux today!”

    (sorry. I couldn’t help myself 🙂 )

    Your concerns are dead on: the connections between content and teaching/learning in a networked space have yet to be clearly articulated. The tools we use to support teaching and learning should not enforce (or limit) a pedagogical approach.

    I don’t know if this makes sense, or even addresses what you were asking, but, for better or worse, it’s what I started thinking about as a result of your post.

    Cheers,

    Bill

  3. @Lanny Your question has haunted me all day long (in the best and most haunting kind of way). I taught with it in mind this morning, and though I didn’t raise it with my students directly, the discussion and the Kay/Goldberg essay gave my thinking a good boost. I hope to blog tomorrow on where my thoughts are leading me. Such a great question you’ve asked!

    @Bill I prefer Jim’s version too, though I still have all the concerns about content I had before. Your comment addresses them directly and helps enormously in my efforts to clarify my own thinking and identify more precisly what’s so troubling to me in the Wiley example. (To be fair, I have no indication from Prof. Wiley’s site that he puts it forward as an instance of a brave new world of reusable content–if I could leave a comment on his site, I’d raise the question with him.) When I combine your comment with Lanny’s question, something starts to click for me.

    There’s a meta level here that often, perhaps usually goes unaddressed. That meta level was necessary in the early days of computing because the vision was so strange and the potential so fanciful. Now that computing is commodified, the meta level has disappeared into the commodity. Commodification is by definition a leveling process. Unfortunately, the leveling has made it difficult to think (again) about what all these high-speed symbol machines imply, or could realize.

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