Incremental Changes
3 min read
From my comment on Gardner Campbell's blog:
Hello, Gardner,
As a few people have already pointed out, these are incremental moves -- Open Content has been around for a while, as have blog-based classes. I think most of us are in agreement that, in general terms, these are Good Things, and that these shifts are improvements over expensive textbooks and cumbersome, expensive, proprietary LMS's.
The incremental shifts, however, become more meaningful when considered together.
Pulling content from a closed repository isn't all that big a deal -- we've had rss for a while. But, putting high quality content into a container where it can be readily remixed and reused is an incremental step in the right direction.
Using this newly liberated content as the basis for constructing a course isn't that big a deal either. You can use a blog as the skeleton for a traditional course, or you can use the blog as a tool for fostering discussion within a network of learners. And in this case, the second approach is what generates the excitement.
If you port open content into a blog-based class where students can participate using the tools of their choosing, you are allowing students to participate in a way that doesn't shut them off from their own intellectual work. This is an enormous shift from the traditional LMS.
So, when you combine these pieces together, you get:
- Open Content in a highly portable, reusable format. This open content, unlike most open content currently out there, is easy to reuse.
- If you collect your newly created curriculum into a planning repository, you then begin to create a new body of Open Content, thus increasing the amount of good quality open content.
- When you import your curriculum into a social learning space (I agree w/Chris -- the term "blog" gets confusing), you create class record of student interaction around open content.
- Students interact in the learning space by using their chosen tools; they always have control over their work. Subsequently, they can make that into a PLE/portfolio if they want to, completely outside of the course context.
- All of this has been accomplished using tools that are easy to set up, inexpensive to use, and easy to administer.
All of these are incremental changes. However, when you put these changes together, they allow for a degree of flexibility and control not present in most systems. As to whether it's evolutionary or revolutionary, I don't know, nor do I really care. It's an improvement that has the potential to get high quality content to a broader range of people at a lower cost.
