George Siemens on Educational Content

This seemed very relevant to thinking about the idea of the Keene State Learning and Teaching Commons as we go forward. Quoted at length from a much longer article, but the whole article is well worth reading.

George doesn’t provide easy answers here about content, and I’m finding as I think through the KLTC I don’t have pat answers either. But these are the right questions:

Content providers to education, after a long period of drubbing, are beginning to find their niche and to push their agenda: high value content, interactive content, well-organized and structured content. During the conference, we heard that publishers feel that we need them and that without their contributions, we are somewhat lost. Quality, structured content was presented as the means to solve education’s dilemmas.

While context is the primary determinant of how we balance content and interaction, I have a different view of content from what publishers promote. I’m not convinced that nicely packaged and structured content is what we need. Yes, I can understand how well structured content can lead to content personalization. But beautiful structures are of limited value when they fail to serve the needs of society. Properly tagged content, tied to learning objectives and learning profiles means nothing if it doesn’t assist in developing the learners ability to produce personal content (rather than being fed personalized content).

We can organize our content in two primary ways: technologically or socially. These methods have some overlap. Technology enables the social (folksonomies) and the social drives the technological (Facebook). There seems to be a drive to organize the worlds content in a type of digital Library of Alexandria. I think that’s a reasonable idea. But we have to ask ourselves how digital content should be organized based on what it is rather than on our assumptions of content organization.

If we were to build a library today, what would it look like? What would we include? How would we make sense of it? Do we worry about having too much? Or do we take a Google-like approach and dump everything, wherever, and apply intelligence at the point of search. Do we need organization applied at the point of content creation or do we need it applied at the point of use or search?

Quality of content is a genuine concern. A pure dichotomy doesn’t exist, but we can see points of tension: Apple App Store vs Androd Apps, Britannica vs Wikipedia. How much curation do we need? How will we determine quality? How will end-user feedback inform our actions?

The availability of open educational resources also changes the teachers role in relation to content. Teachers should use freely available resources wherever possible. If resources don’t exist on a subject, these should be developed collaboratively across school systems. In terms of content, learners should create, teachers should curate.

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