SocialLearn Research Blog

This week Richard Katz was at The Open University giving a talk called ‘Digital Age – Real Disruption’. He talked about The Busyness of Scholarship and how digital discovery, retrieval, assessment, annotation, tagging, indexing and storage has made scholarship more efficient. He also talked about the liberation of knowledge and the challenge of curation.

One of the nuggets that has stuck in my mind is a quote he used from Marshall McLuhan:

“The past dissolves before the future resolves”

SocialLearn might be The Future of Learning – albeit a small piece of a loosely joined future. In fact Clayton Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation model has encouraged us to develop a learning platform on the social web in order to shape the future of distance education. If we accept that a) technologies are changing what is possible in education, and b) a new generation of learners will have expectations based on their use of technology, then we should be hearing the hiss of the past as it starts to dissolve. We should grow our business on the assumption there are significant changes coming in the way people teach and learn – technically, pedagogically and philosophically. As a business we need to adapt quicker and be better than our competitors. As a distance learning institution we are perhaps most at risk from new offerings in online learning. On the flip side we also have most to offer and gain and we should be the quickest to adapt in the HE sector.

Yet the past has not yet dissolved and so the future is anything but resolved. It remains to be seen whether SocialLearn is the solvent to the current Open University model. When the past dissolves, we might begin to see what a future solution looks like. In the meantime the mantra is innovate, experiment, iterate. Richard raised the issue that the ‘cheap, quick and dirty’ approach (taken by many disruptive innovations) was a problem for universities. I wish he had elaborated.

One of Richard’s slides suggested a future solution might be “An education as simple, rich, accessible and diverse as applications from the Apple app store”. He also said:

“In the next decade the modern university is less likely to be a place, than an idea instantiated in architecture – physical and virtual”.

David Wiley is part of a startup called FlatWorld Knowledge. Their aim is to publish textbooks free of charge online, with users paying for the printed version if they want it. But it goes beyond this and really gets at the role of the textbook in education. For a start the educator can edit the text book, so their students get the version relevant to their course. And then there are tools for working with other students around the text. People can sell content (and services I guess) also in a marketplace.

There could be some good synergy with the social, multiple tools approach of socialearn here.