elearning2.0

I'm starting to realise just how big the communications challenge is for us 'elearning2.0' advocates and developers. This stuff seems obvious to those of us who have invested years of painful development effort in artefacts like heavyweight learning objects repositories, and who have since have come to prefer loosely coupled, lightweight services for our own working practices. But I am discovering that web2.0 is counter-intuitive and even repellent to a lot of other people in the educational technology business. It takes time and practice for people to become happy with the web2.0 way of getting things done. We need to start spreading the word about compelling practical examples and vividly written explanations.

Scott Wilson has been producing some great, "gettable" figures and presentations lately. In this post I discuss a presentation he recently gave in Norway in which he reflected personally on the failure of the Big Standards approach, and the opportunities opened up by web2.0 with its smallscale standards and services and largescale emergent benefits.

A powerpoint presentation I gave yesterday in Norway - eduresources (PPT, 8.6Mb). Apologies for the file size, I included a lot of screen captures! If you'd prefer a smaller file, or just have problems with the powerpoint, I've also got an archive of JPEGs: eduresources.zip (ZIP, 3Mb)

I've attached a conversion of his ppt slides into a pdf on white background for printing. (Scott, this version has corrected the oversize text in the one I emailed you originally; I've made a little KeyNote theme to handle that in future conversions). As you might guess from that, I like to read things like this offline. And just about the only real chance I have to do so is when I'm on a train, which thank heavens has been seldom these days. Yesterday I finally gave Scott's presentation my full attention, and realised what a great resource it is for communicating these opportunities and issues to ed-tech folks.

I particularly liked his slides 10 and 11:

• So, we can create libraries of learning objects, and assemble them in all kinds of combinations to suit any need, all a teacher need do is select the correct combinations for their context.

• But there is one small problem...

• It doesn’t work

Scott goes on to qualify and explain that dramatic assertion, and to introduce some of the services and architectural styles that make the web2.0 approach to using learning resources so attractive. He also develops some ideas about other ways of approaching the issue of using resources. See for instance:

• slide 41 : using resources; the repository view
• slide 42 : using resources; the web view
• slide 46 : using resources; the web2.0 view
• slide 39 : so how are we to share [1]?
• slide 67 : so how are we to share [2]?

Now, I guess I should fess up about 2 things which explain some of my personal delight at reading those words:

1. In the mid to late 90's, I was a committed advocate of the approach I have since come to call Big Standards: people like me used to go on at great length about how wonderful these 'learning objects' were going to be, and why heavy-duty structured metadata and object repositories were essential to realising our vision of open, active elearning
2. Since the late 90's, I have opposed the Big Standards approach: It became clear to me that there were not going to be many highly interactive learning objects (in the object-oriented programming sense) and that we had all just bought a lot of snake oil.

I have spent the years since 1999 increasingly convinced that:

• concepts like "learning objects", "learning objects metadata" and "learning object repository" have lost their ambition and become overblown ways of denoting low-tech concepts like 'web pages', 'categories' and 'database'
• the reality of Big System / Big Standards elearning for almost all its users has been disastrously bad
• fundamental breakthroughs in the collaborative web were needed before organised online learning was of any use to learners

In fact, that pretty much sums up the mission of KnowNet: work hard to try to exemplify and explore those much-needed improvements to the collaborative web. (For instance, see this Online EDUCA 2001 paper).

And ( no thanks to us :o) improvements have started to appear. The web is much more collaborative now than it has been, and extremely rich new functionalities have started to emerge from an ecology of simple services, rich interfaces, massive uptake and easy re-use.

The web is smart because of the richness and variety of the interactions people have within it, not because its content is getting any smarter. Resources do not have to be smart for the system - the whole wild web and its real world users - to be rich and interesting. We do not have to regulate and contain the resources that learners use; on the contrary, our job is to add value to the system by making it even easier for people to interact meaningfully with each other, single, in groups or in emergent communities.

Thus, although it's been a long time since I've had any interest in Big Standards Learning Objects Repositories, it makes me very happy to read Scott's sharply-put words helping the rest of the ed-tech community to 'think out of the repository'.

Technorati Tags: elearning, elearning2.0, learning-resources, web2.0, repositories