I’m even later to the party than Steve, which I sure he will remind me of on a daily basis. That said, I appreciate your thoughts here very much and will try to engage them in depth soon. Maybe even in person? For now I’ll just say that my own vision (as you know) is that learners will not only become skilled in linking and aggregating but also skilled in thinking hard about web-enabled information and publishing architectures. I see the Bluehost sandbox at $8 a month as an innovation environment, what Jon Udell called a “user innovation toolkit,” with scalability and greater functionality provided by slightly more expensive hosting services such as CastIron. There’s an interesting and natural progression there that makes a lot of sense.

One key in all cases, I agree, is to stay as lightweight as possible for as long as possible, though you and I would probably disagree at least slightly on when to “go heavier.” Another key, in my view, is that in the end only the user truly scales.(I forget where I heard it–a podcast on Wikipedia, maybe?–but someone said that true scaling is like NYC, while controlled planning around limits instead of possibilities leads to something like The Mall of America–which has its uses too, but not the way NYC does of course.) It’s a slight variation on the “teach a man to fish” idea, heading in the direction of Jon Udell’s vision of “hosted lifebits.”

When higher education focuses on the infrastructure that enables innovation instead of the enterprise “solution” that holds and presents (and walls off) content, then we’ll be in a better place. And I’m convinced that higher ed is uniquely empowered to build an innovation infrastructure, or to put it in Engelbart’s terms, a “capability infrastructure”–since that’s another way of saying “education,” I think.

Have you read Illich’s “Deschooling Society” yet? I think you’d find a kindred spirit there, as it happens another Reverend in fact.

How’d you know I wasn’t telling the complete truth?

Damn. That’ll learn me for telling a falsehood to the Reverend. I can’t get away with nuthin.

Cheers,

Bill

PS. All kidding aside, we are saying pretty identical things here. And anything that supports open standards, such as this blog with its RSS and Atom feeds, will be in a great position to be incorporated into a distributed learning network.

Because, as much as I perseverate about a particular piece of software, the software is of secondary importance, behind the learning activities going on within the application.

Cheers,

Bill

I know you ‘re lying, but it doesn’t matter because we can only get along for so long before things fall apart!

WRT “a moratorium on developing new software, not developing out the existing stuff” — fully agreed. The basic tools exist. They now need improvement so that non-technical users can access them.

Adding in things like filtering by topic, keyword, relevance (although relevance is highly subjective and likely to change across contexts and across users) is also critical, and potentially could be managed at the source of the content or at the point of import.

I also agree that we are pretty much talking about doing the same thing in the same way — and really, this is not a conversation about tools or software or platforms, but about supporting teaching and learning. It also has implications with empowering a user to own their learning, but these tools can be used effectively without ever going down the philosophical rabbit hole.

But it would be a lot easier not to talk about tools if you didn’t use such a simplistic blogging platform.

Sorry. I tried to take the high road. Really, I did. But by the time I realized what I had written I had already hit the “Submit” botton, and it was too late — see how the word “button” is misspelled in the earlier line? I was writing so hastily that I didn’t even have time to go back and correct my misspelling, let alone edit out any potentially misdirected aspersions concerning blog software
Cheers,

Bill

@Bill:

I don’t know why I always get so happy when you comment, but nonetheless I do. In D’Arcy’d defense (though I know I should be feeding the rift between Drupal fanboys and that D’Arcy is fully capable of defending himself) he seems to be talking about a moratorium on developing new software, not developing out the existing stuff to sing to the tune you outline beautifully above.

I think the logic is to sit down and work through the tools we have identified as crucial to moving the content freely between contexts, and find away to make the eduglu of various RSS formats for numerous applications a bit more intelligent in terms of filtering by topic, keyword, relevance, etc. Both of which are not unlike what your are doing with Moodle, Drupal, and MediaWiki. I personally see our visions as completely aligned (D’Arcy, you, and I as well as many others like the fangirl Jennifer), we just have silly bantering sessions about Drupal and Wordpress.

By the way, thanks for the kind words about UMW Blogs, it works so far and that is purely because the faculty and students at UMW are truly amazing. The technology is just easy enough to foster their proclivity to be open and intelligent simultaneously.

Some great thoughts and observations here —

On days when I’m feeling cynical, I can’t get around the sensation that some of the motivation driving the discussion on “issues of scalability, sustainability, localization, and other infra-structural issues” has less to do with scalability, sustainability, and culturally competent/translated content than it has to do with controlling the flow of content, or slowing the process while businesses figure out how to make money off of licensing.

Because: we have rss and atom, json, soap and rest calls, and xml-rpc, to name a few — all lightweight methods of moving information from point A to point B. When content is transported (not referenced, but actually copied) from one place to another, it can then be recontextualized, remixed, reused — all the things that most folks within the open content arena agree need to be happening.

One of the things that is amazing to see about what you are doing at UMW is that you have proceeded to build out a lightweight infrastructure that works. People can criticize it as unscalable, etc, but when the dust settles you have the same basic response as defenders of Wikipedia: it only works in practice.

The same is true of using existing tools to make truly open content possible — it only works in practice. I only half agree with D’Arcy: we need to be using the existing tools, but they need to be developed in order to allow the everyday user (a teacher, a student, someone working on their own without the resources of a university behind them) to access, import, and recontextualize content. These tools need to run on FOSS platforms to guarantee free availability and access.

Cheers,

Bill

Adequately funding quality education in the less developed world will be where you need to start there.