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Quel intérêt de laisser le CNED proposer seul dans son coin ces maigres ressources alors que l’on possède en son sein des enseignants aussi productifs ayant une solide expérience du « travailler ensemble » ?

L’Éducation nationale est une cathédrale et non un réseau social (et encore moins une communauté).

Licences fermées, professeurs peu impliqués et éditeurs confortés dans leur immobilisme… tout ceci ne devrait pas tenir longtemps parce que par delà nos frontières c’est la pleine effervescence autour de ce que l’on appelle les ressources éducatives libres.

’expression Ressources Éducatives Libres (REL) désigne un mouvement mondial initié par des fondations, universités, enseignants et pédagogues visant à créer et distribuer via internet des ressources éducatives (cours, manuels, logiciels éducatifs, etc.) libres et gratuites

Oublions les Facebook, Twitter, Dailymotion et autres gadgets de communication légèrement hors-sujet par rapport aux réels enjeux. Et osons faire passer l’académie en ligne du mode « lecture seul » au mode « lecture / écriture ensemble ». Car le plus grand service que l’on puisse rendre présentement aux enseignants est d’inscrire ce projet dans le cadre des ressources éducatives libres.

Dans le cas contraire, regarder passer le train des ressources éducatives libres constituerait selon nous une triple erreur : historique, politique et par dessus tout pédagogique.

Au moins trois différents types de publics peuvent se côtoyer
dans un CRL : les étudiants bien sûr, mais aussi les enseignants,
ainsi que les personnes en formation continue.

Travailler dans un centre de ressources ne signifie en aucun cas rester
seul face à des machines ou à des livres, même si un
CRL est avant tout un lieu où sont réunies des ressources
d'apprentissage. Par ressources, il faut entendre les dossiers d'autoformation
construits à partir de supports variés, dont ceux offerts
par la technologie, ainsi que les ressources humaines que constituent les
personnes chargées de l'encadrement.

ne partie
des dossiers d'autoformation met l'accent sur la langue de spécialité;
ces dossiers sont construits à partir de supports didactiques authentiques,
c'est-à-dire non calibrés à priori pour un usage pédagogique.
Il s'agit d'articles de la presse spécialisée, de conférences
en langue vivante étrangère dans le domaine considéré,
d'émissions télévisées, de documentaires, etc.
Ces supports sont accompagnés de dossiers, qui donnent des indications
sur la manière de tirer profit du support, et qui proposent un appareil
pédagogique constitué, selon le cas, d'une aide lexicale,
d'exercices divers, de la transcription des documents sonores, etc.

dossiers didactiques liés ou non à la langue de spécialité.
Il s'agit d'articles de presse, de films long-métrage en V.O., d'informations
télévisées captées par antenne parabolique,
de cassettes (audio et vidéo) d'apprentissage de la langue, de logiciels
(notamment multimédia), de CD-ROMs, d'ouvrages de références,
d'exercices de grammaire ou de vocabulaire (sur papier ou sur machine),
etc. Des dossiers d'aide méthodologique proposent des méthodes
d'apprentissage ponctuelles (comment faire un résumé par
exemple, ou bien comment se servir d'un dictionnaire), ou générales
(comment organiser son apprentissage en vue de tel ou tel objectif).

Il ne saurait y avoir d'apprentisage individualisé sans suivi
pédagogique. D'où l'importance de l'encadrement. Les étudiants
disposent ainsi de véritables "ressources humaines", en
la personne des professeurs de langues chargés de l'organisation,
du suivi et de l'évaluation de l'apprentissage, des moniteurs-étudiants
qui s'occupent des flux de matériel, des tuteurs de langue chargés
d'apporter un soutien linguistique, ainsi que d'étudiants étrangers
(ERASMUS) qui animent des séances de conversation.

Une chose est de mettre les ressources à disposition, une autre
est d'en promouvoir une utilisation efficace. Les étudiants sont
invités à se construire un parcours d'apprentissage où
ils sont amenés à choisir des outils d'apprentissage en fonction
d'objectifs, à évaluer leur progression, à se motiver
et à découvrir les stratégies d'apprentissage qui
leur conviennent le mieux.

Les objectifs peuvent être institutionnels et/ou personnels. Les
premiers consistent en des compétences concernant la langue de spécialité,
par exemple savoir lire un article du domaine, ou comprendre une conférence
en langue étrangère, et sont fixés après concertation
avec la filière; les seconds sont déterminés par les
étudiants eux-mêmes en fonction de leur histoire personnelle
d'apprentissage des langues, et de critères individuels, tels que
le désir de savoir soutenir une conversation en langue étrangère,
ou de comprendre les films en V.O.

Les étudiants sont incités à consigner dans un
carnet de bord les diverses ressources utilisées pour atteindre
leurs objectifs. Ils peuvent également y faire des commentaires
sur les difficultés rencontrées, leurs projets d'apprentissage
à court ou long terme, etc.

Des dossiers d'auto-évaluation sont mis à la disposition
des étudiants. Ils ont une fonction d'évaluation formative,
c'est-à-dire qu'ils permettent aux étudiants de faire le
point sur les compétences acquises, ainsi que sur celles qui ne
le sont pas encore.

Un CRL tel qu'il fonctionne dans les expériences strasbourgeoises
comprend 5 zones d'apprentissage principales, définies en fonction
du type de ressources utilisées. On distingue une zone pour le travail
écrit et la lecture, un laboratoire de langue, une zone pour la
vidéo, une autre qui comprend les ordinateurs, ainsi qu'une ou plusieurs
petites salles pour la conversation, ou le travail par petits groupes en
atelier sur des thèmes donnés, et animés par un professeur.

prévoir un entretien technique par du personnel compétent

La cheville ouvrière d’un CRL, c’est bien entendu l’encadrement,
composé d’enseignants de langue et de moniteurs-étudiants.
En effet, certaines des tâches - distribuer le matériel, aiguiller
les étudiants vers les nouveautés, aider ceux d'entre eux
qui ne sauraient pas faire fonctionner les ordinateurs, mettre à
jour les dossiers et les listes, etc. - peuvent être accomplies par
des moniteurs étudiants non-linguistes.

On peut également engager des étudiants linguistes (niveau
maîtrise ou plus) qui se destinent à l'enseignement, et qui
sont généralement heureux d'acquérir ainsi une première
expérience professionnelle.

Le travail de l'encadrement étudiant se fait sous la supervision
des professeurs de langue.

Un rôle très important est d'établir
des liens harmonieux avec la filière, seuls garants d'une bonne
intégration du CRL dans son environnement. Mais leur rôle
principal est sans aucun doute l'animation du CRL, c'est-à-dire
l'organisation des flux d'étudiants, l'information, la mise en place
d'ateliers destinés à répondre à des besoins
spécifiques. Un CRL comprend, comme son nom l'indique, des ressources,
qui doivent être acquises, ou créées. Les choix d'acquisition
impliquent une veille pédagogique, très gourmande en temps.
Une autre tâche importante est la production de ressources là
où le marché ne les fournit pas,

I said, the student of the future will not start up an operating system, internet browser, word processor and email program in order to start work on a course. The student will start up the course, which in turn will start up these applications on its own.

The 2008 instantiation of this idea is the widget. A widget is a piece of code – typically written in Flash or Javascript – that resides on a desktop or web page and performs a specific function.

A widget obtains content from one website and displays it on another website. Often user interaction is provided – the user might type a term into a search widget, for example – and often some form of processing is requested at the remote website.

Widgets can be combined as a collection of services through web sites called ‘webtops’. These websites, such as PageFlakes and Netvibes, import content and services and arrange them on a page according to user settings and preferences.

It does not matter what operating system is used to view such pages because they are displayed inside the web browser

In particular, education is fundamentally a process of communication (learning, by contrast, is fundamentally a process of growth).

The PAD (Personal Access Device)

In 1998 I wrote that ‘The PAD will become the dominant tool for online education, combining the function of book, notebook and pen.” The PAD, I said, would be “a lightweight notebook computer with touch screen functions and high speed wireless internet access.” I also said it would cost around three hundred dollars.

By 2008, the prescience of that prediction has been proven.

With slim, lightweight technology, truly useful and portable PADs will be widely available within the next ten years.

In the future, it will be common to see these large-area displays hanging on living room and classroom walls. Instead of being the size of small windows, they will be the size of large blackboards.

The combination of portable and affordable computing devices, combined with widely available digital presentation tools, will make education genuinely personal and portable.

It is important to think not simply about how these technologies will operate individually but rather about how they will operate in combination. A person will move content online and offline with ease. Software and multimedia will no longer be associated with hardware or other devices but will rather be associated with individuals and will express their personal preferences. We are already seeing this as people can download and carry their own portable applications around with them.

The term ‘presentation software’ can be used to refer to applications designed to display learning material to students. (TechTarget, 2005) In the past, these learning materials were confined to physical media such as video tapes or CD-ROMS.

On the one hand, sophisticated tools have been placed into the hands of instructors and non-professionals to facilitate the creation of multimedia presentations. To name just a few, we could point PowerPoint, which allows instructors to create slides; to Audacity, which facilitates audio recording and editing, Adobe Premiere Elements, an inexpensive and accessible video editing tool; Camtasia, a screen-recording and video editing tool; and Second life, which enables people to create three-dimensional objects.

On the other hand, even more sophisticated tools have been placed into the hands of professional designers.

Thus there is, at any given time, a professional educational content community that creates high-end and custom educational content and a non-professional community that creates (relatively) low-end and more personalized educational content.

This concept, which in education became the idea of the ‘learning object’, emerged as a result of the idea that reusable software objects could be created.

Web 2.0 is actually a cluster of technologies that combine to allow web sites to become interactive.

The tools that we use today were in development in 1998 – multimedia or content engines such as PowerPoint or Director, development environments such as .Net, programming languages such as Java or Ruby, rendering systems such as VRML or SMIL. These now are disappearing into the background, while practitioners are working directly with content creation tools, both on the desktop and on the web.

In recent years educators have come more and more to believe that the presentation of educational content is but a small part of the learning process. To paraphrase the Cluetrain Manifesto, which came out roughly the same time as the Future of Online Learning, “all classrooms are conversations.”

As I noted in 1998, people will want a system that transfers data as well as video signals. These applications do that, providing audio and video communication while also allowing application and desktop sharing, whiteboards and notes, polling, text messaging, and more.

While the systems typically used in an educational environment are commercial applications involving some cost, similar applications are rapidly becoming available for free to the average user.

Skype provides free audio communication (and as of 2006, free video communication) to users around the world. (Skype, 2005) Moreover, open source conferencing suites, such as Dim Dim and WiZiQ, are emulating the function of commercial applications.

Two major trends have characterized the last ten years of asynchronous conferencing.

First, as was easy to predict in 1998, the dominance of text-based content has given way to a much wider range of formats. Audio content became popular with file sharing and music content services, as well as with the rise of podcasting in 2003. Video content became widely available following the development of Flash video services and of sites like YouTube, which allowed users to upload and convert their videos.

Early web conferencing systems followed the same format, taking the form of threaded conversations on web bulletin boards. This system was followed in just a few years by blogging. Messages were sorted chronologically by author, instead of by subject, and each person managed his or her own blog. Groups of people, meanwhile, congregated on content management systems such as Drupal or Plone. But as people drifted back to centralized sites, and as linking to other people became more important, sites that support social networks rose to prominence and people began to spend less time on places like Blogger and LiveJournal and more time on places like MySpace and Facebook.

that once content standards have been widely adopted for some type of medium, content expressed in that medium has become commoditized (that is to say, widely available at prices that approximate zero).

Efforts to monetize content have, in turn, typically involved the creation of proprietary content formats.

We now have powerful and inexpensive computers we can sling over our shoulder or carry in our shirt pocket. (Yamamoto, 2006) These computers are connected wirelessly to the internet at bandwidths sufficient to allow instant multimedia communication anywhere on the planet. These computers will only improve in the years ahead, becoming faster, slimmer, and more affordable.

In the end, the standards win, because, in the end, the people win. Societies – or groups, or communities – that sustain effective communication are more robust than societies that control it. There is a significant loss of efficiency in environments of closed, controlled communication. Thus, although artificial constraints will continue to be used maintain proprietary communications formats, the standards will win out.

To date, much of our attention, even in the field of online learning, has been focused on a system of learning centered on the class or cohort: groups of students studying the same curriculum pace through the same set of learning activities. (Fenning, 2004) We continue to organize classes in grades, sorted, especially in the earlier years, by age. Time continues to be the dominant metaphor for units of learning, and learning continues to be constrained by time.

While we want to provide personalized attention, especially to submitted work, testing and grading, learning is still heavily dependent on the teacher. But because the teacher in turn is responsible for assembling, and often presenting, the materials to be learned, customization and personalization have not been practical. So we have adopted a model where small groups of people form a cohort, thus allowing the teacher to present the same material to more than one person at a time, while offering individualized interaction and assessment.

What we have begun to notice with online learning, however, is a decreasing emphasis on this formal style of learning, and an increasing emphasis on what has come to be called informal learning. (Chivers, 2006) In the case of informal learning, students are not constrained by the limits of the classroom model. They can set their own curriculum and proceed at their own pace. (Moore, 1986) Learning can thus be based on a student’s individual needs, rather than as predefined in a formal class, and based on a student’s schedule, rather than that set by the institution.

Traditionally, people have been seen to learn either as individuals or in groups. This characterization of organization is not unique to education; it is very common to talk of (say) the needs of the individual versus the needs of the state. This characterization, however, glosses over the possibility that there may be more or less cohesive ways of organizing people, thus allowing for a middle point between the individual and the group: the network.

Though networks have always existed, modern communications technologies highlight their existence and given them a new robustness. Networks are distinct from groups in that they preserve individual autonomy and promote diversity of belief, purpose and methodology. In a network, however, people do not act as disassociated individuals, but rather, cooperate in a series of exchanges that can produce, not merely individual goods, but also social goods.

Classes are closed; there is a clear barrier between members and non-members.

In the case of informal learning, however, the structure is much looser. People pursue their own objectives in their own way, while at the same time initiating and sustaining an ongoing dialogue with others pursuing similar objectives. Learning and discussion is not structured, but rather, is determined by the needs and interests of the participants. There is no leader; each person participates as they deem appropriate. There are no boundaries; people drift into and out of the conversation as their knowledge and interests change.

the LMS was not based on personalized learning, but rather, preserved the course management structure that prevailed in schools and universities.

Personal Learning Environments

In the future, competences will be just one way (and an unusually employer-centered way) to select learning opportunities. What we will see, rather, is that the selection of learning opportunities will not be a stand-alone activity, but instead will be embedded in other activities.

The PLE is not an application, but rather, a description of the process of learning in situ from a variety of courses and according to one’s personal, context-situated, needs. The process, simply, is that learners will be presented with learning resources according to their interests, aptitudes, educational levels, and other factors (including employer factor and social factors) while they are in the process of working at their job, engaging in a hobby, or playing a game.

The environment that they happen to be in, whether it be a productivity tool, hobbyist web page, or online game, constitutes (at that time) the personal learning environment. Resources from across the internet are accessed from that environment: resources that conform to the student’s needs and interests, that have been in some way pre-selected or favorably filtered, and that may have been created by production studios, teachers, other students, or the student him or herself. Content – interaction, media, data – flows back and forth between the learning environment and the external resources, held together by the single identity being employed by the learner in this context.

We might think that these educational delivery systems will be delivering learning objects. This is not entirely incorrect, although a learning object today has come to be seen as more like a unit of text in a textbook or a lesson in a programmed learning workbook. It will be more accurate in the future to say ‘learning resource’, since many such resources will be available that do not conform to the traditional picture of a learning object – and may be as simply as a single image, or as complex as a simulation or training module.

The personal learning environment, however, is not based on the principle of access to resources. It should more accurately be viewed as a mechanism to interact with multiple services. (Milligan, 2006) The personal learning environment is more of a conferencing tool than it is a content tool. The focus of a personal learning environment is more on creation and communication than it is consumption and completion. It is best to think of the interfaces facilitated by a personal learning environment as ways to create and manipulate content, as applications rather than resources.

In particular, that the various channels created by the PLE enable is for a student to form a set of connections with a collection of individuals at any given point

This idea is reflected today in the concept of the e-portfolio, where the products created through the process of engagement and interaction are stored and (digitally) mounted for display. We see today the idea of an e-portfolio taking hold outside traditional learning – people have their own blogs, their own Flickr photo portfolios, art projects on Deviant Art, game modifications, fan fiction, open source software, and much more.

The educational institution is unlikely to disappear, but it is unlikely also to remain the sole locus of student learning. Educational institutions will need more and more to think of themselves as part of a larger system, and as their offerings as entities that will become a part of, and interact with, the larger environment.

connectivism. (Siemens, 2004) The theory proposes that knowledge is contained, not merely in the bits of information transmitted to and fro as content and creations, but in the way these contents, and the people that create them, link together.

The purpose of educational institutions, therefore, is not merely to create and distribute learning opportunities and resources, but also to facilitate a student’s participation in a learning environment

As discussed above, educational institutions will need to see themselves as providers of learning resources (and not merely learning objects). These resources will be online services that connect students with: learning content; games, simulations, and other activities; ad hoc communities of learners; and experts and other practitioners. They will be specialized multimedia content consumption, editing and authoring systems designed to facilitate a student’s ability to perceive and perform as modeled by experts in a community of practice.

Today, institutions do not yet know how to deliver information to other systems.

However, institutions are beginning to learn to prepare content for distribution through remote systems, such as the provision of lectures for delivery through iTunes University. Such systems will evolve over time into a mature system of open content distribution, facilitated through open access mandates, repository and other server software, and content and interaction standards.

Today, as noted above, we tend to think of such resources as static and bibliographical, like books in a library, where contents are ‘published’ and then ‘stored’. This view is evident in much of the discussion that surrounds learning technology today. We think of work as being stored in a research repository, indexed and archived, in such a way that we can search for them, typically through a catalogue (or metadata) system, and retrieve them. (Barker, 2007) The major concerns of educators in this environment are things like persistence and provenance, copyright and reproduction. (Jantz & Giarlo, 2005)

In the networked learning environment, however, learning resources are best thought of not as content objects about a discipline that are retrieved and studied, but rather as words in a multimedia vocabulary that is used by students and teachers in an ongoing conversation within a discipline to engage in projects and activities. (Downes, The New Literacy, 2002) Content and learning resources, rather than being thought of as static objects, ought to be thought of as a dynamic flow. They are more like water or electricity and they are like books and artifacts.
The technology of learning – and of the web generally – is evolving to accommodate flow.

Most educators, and most educational institutions, have not yet embraced the idea of flow and syndication in learning. They will – reluctantly – because it provides the learner with the means to manage and control his or her learning. They can keep unwanted content to a minimum (and this includes unwanted content from an institution). And they can manage many more sources – or content streams – using feed reader technology.

RSS and related specifications will be one of the primary ways Personal Learning Environments connect with remote systems. To use a PLE will be essentially to immerse oneself in the flow of communications that constitutes a community of practice in some discipline or domain on the internet.

When people think of personalized online learning, they frequently think of adaptive systems, learning programs powered by artificial intelligences that test a student’s competence, formulate customized lesson plans based on those pre-tests, and then measure a student’s performance though a series of online activities. (Boticario & Santos, 2007)

While people will no doubt pursue solo learning activities (just as they, by themselves, read books today) this will not constitute the core of the learning experience in the future (just as reading books does not constitute the core of learning today).

In the end, what will be evaluated is a complex portfolio of a student’s online activities. (Syverson & Slatin, 2006)These will include not only the results from games and other competitions with other people and with simulators, but also their creative work, their multimedia projects, their interactions with other people in ongoing or ad hoc projects, and the myriad details we consider when we consider whether or not a person is well educated.
Though there will continue to be ‘degrees’, these will be based on a mechanism of evaluation and recognition, rather than a lockstep marching through a prepared curriculum. And educational institutions will not have a monopoly on such evaluations (though the more prestigious ones will recognize the value of aggregating and assessing evaluations from other sources).

Earning a degree will, in such a world, resemble less a series of tests and hurdles, and will come to resemble more a process of making a name for oneself in a community. The recommendation of one person by another as a peer will, in the end, become the standard of educational value, not the grade or degree.

but online learning is at heart a form of distance learning, and therefore offers as one of its primary advantages a form of time and place independence for the learner. Cloud computing and mobile computing will offer these forms of independence. They can, indeed, be thought of as offering a third, equally important, form of independence: device independence.

Time Independence

We are well used to the idea that students, whether working in traditional online courses or independently through informal learning, will access their materials and activities at any time of the day. They can work any day of the week, or if they are employed in agriculture or some other seasonal occupation, any time of the year.

Place Independence

Online learning stiff suffers from the misperception that it is about having students sit in front of their computer screen for extended periods of time. As a consequence, the idea that online learning might foster independence of place has been missing in much of the discussion of the field.

That said, much of the learning that is happening in today’s schools is beginning to resemble the sort of learning that one might expect in a connected environment. Student-centered methodologies are becoming widely accepted in many nations. In particular, constructivist pedagogies are being implemented in some e-learning technology, such as Moodle, and adopted by some systems, such as in the province of Quebec, Canada.

The convergence of digital life with in-person life is not, therefore, a mere addition of a digital dimension to the in-person life we lead today. It transforms and reshapes that life, removing from it elements that could be done more efficiently (or more pleasantly) in a digital environment, and opening up opportunities for new and more types of in-person activities.

Learning Communities

Education is not merely the acquisition of new information and skills. To become educated in a discipline is to learn the habits, patterns, ways of thinking and ways of thinking characteristic of that discipline. Consequently, learning is a social activity, wherein we immerse ourselves into what Etienne Wenger called a community of practice, learn what Michael Polanyi called tacit knowledge, and be able to complete, as Thomas Kuhn famously summarized, the problems at the end of the chapter.

Interest-Based Communities

Today we would use the label ‘communities of practice’ to label ‘interest-based communities’, or as I also called them, ‘topic-based communities’.

Wenger’s characterization was informative. Communities would form around a topic of interest – the ‘domain’. They would engage in community activities – “members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information.” And they would share a practice – a repertoire of resources, a vocabulary, common stories, common methodologies, common ways of approaching a problem.

Learning in the community of practice takes the form of what might be called ‘peer-to-peer professional development activities’. Rather than formalized learning, members help each other directly.

peer-based communities are almost the polar opposite of interest-based communities. They are not based on some common interest; one member may be an artist while the other may be a scientist. In the first instance, they are created through proximity, being composed of people who live in the same neighborhood or who go to the same school. Over the longer term, we may say, they are just people who meet by happenstance, and find an affinity for each other.

Given convergence, it was inevitable that these communities would also establish themselves online. Indeed, the secret to the rise of Facebook, which rose to prominence in a short time, and which now has the most traffic of any site on the internet, is that it formed connections between friends based on their common origins and common schools

It is probably a truism today (though there still remain exceptions to be observed online) that communities are grown rather than constructed, and that (therefore) they are owned (and managed) by their members rather than by some external agency. The desire for autonomy comes part and parcel with some of the perceived benefits of learning and growing in a community: safely, security, and privacy.

The value of a community, however, and especially of a learning community, comes from the diversity in the community. Students gather around an instructor precisely because the instructor has knowledge, beliefs and opinions that the students don’t share. They gather around each other because they each have unique experiences. Fistering a learning community is as much a matter of drawing on the differences as it is a matter of underlining the similarities.

What will work best online, therefore, will not be a process of community building, but rather, a process of community enabling. The transition in community is therefore analogous, and parallel, to the transition in content. Just as people no longer need publishers to create content for them, they no longer need organizers to create community. Rather, just as, with access to powerful content-creation tools, they can create their own content, in the same way, with powerful community-building tools, they can create their own communities.

Learners will create their own communities, their own environments. At most, the educator needs to ensure that the tools are there for students to use, and that the channels of communication, from student to student, from community to community, are open.

To learn is not to acquire or to accumulate, but rather, to develop or to grow. The process of learning is a process of becoming, a process of developing one’s own self.

The Triad

The idea of the triad model is that in any given learning situation, there are three major participants: the student, the instructor, and a local coach or facilitator. The idea was that the instructor would be online, a member of the interest-based learning community, while the coach or facilitator would be more a member of the peer-based community.

The Divergence of Learning and Testing

It hasn’t happened yet in any large scale and formal way, but it is probably inevitable that the domains of ‘learning’ and ‘testing’ will separate. In the future it may even be thought of as quaint that those responsible for the fostering of learning were also those responsible for evaluating whether or not learning actually happened.

n traditional learning there is slow acceptance that people may be tested without first having been taught. Colleges and universities are investigating ‘PLAR’ (Prior Learning And Recognition) systems. People who are in some way able to demonstrate their ability – through a portfolio system, for example, are able to circumvent the need for testing altogether.

Modularity

A History of Modularity

When the concept of the 'learning object' was proposed, a large part of the idea was based on the idea that these small chunks of content would be fitted together to form larger entities. "Like Legos," said some proponents, describing the way the objects would use a universal interface to fir together.

As David Wiley noted after a few years of practice with learning objects, other analogies might be more appropriate - that of the atom, for example, where some parts may fit some other parts, but not all parts fit all other parts.

In the years that have passed, specifications, such as Content Packaging and Simple Sequencing, were designed to facilitate the creation of larger entities out of smaller entities. But the idea of making large content entities out of smaller and reusable content entities began to be challenged. In 'the reusability paradox', Wiley questioned the idea. For content to be usable, he argued, it must be very specific to a context. But if context is very specific to a context, it is not reusable.

It is too early to suggest that the idea of reusable modular content is incorrect, if indeed it ever was incorrect. But Wiley's observations, along with a deeper look at the analogy from mechanical parts, shows that reuse is rather more complex than the mere connection of digital objects together.

Meanwhile, more or less public archives sprang up on the open internet, sites such as the internet Archive, Flickr, YouTube and box.net.

The educational community, however, saw the repository as something that would be housed and managed locally.

Proponents of this model argued that local storage was necessary to ensure reliable access, consistency and persistence.

This is an argument that makes sense when reusable content is being used to construct static and asynchronous courses. As the use of learning resources becomes more dynamic, however, the extra steps required in order to obtain and store locally external content become more onerous. In the long run, a mixture of approaches will be used. Material will be sourced externally – it won’t make any sense to restrict one’s search to a local library – and insofar as local copies are created, this will be done automatically.

As I later argued in my paper Resource Profiles, LOM should not attempt to be all things to all people, and should focus solely on the educational properties of a resource. Moreover, I argued, these educational properties are not identifiable a priori in the resource itself, but rather, are defined over time through use. Consequently, instead of designing LOM as though it were a bibliographic record – which was the practice of the educational technology community – LOM should be integrated with and used with other specifications and standards, forming part of a larger, and more dynamic, resource profile.

What we have seen of web technology as a whole suggests that this is the course that will be taken. A single metadata file – a Dublin Core resource description, for example – now links to external vocabularies, rights declarations, and other metadata. Moreover, metadata created through use, sometimes called attention metadata, is now being merged with bibliographic metadata. And global search sites, such as Google, use their own internally created contextual metadata (such as link information) to organize search results.

While the traditional conception of learning objects was that designers or instructors would assemble smaller chunks of content into coherent presentations of learning material, this is rather the idea that the management of re-use would be placed directly into the learner’s hands, so that reuse could occur, not simply within a course content, but in any context where re-use makes sense.

In this way, the reuse of learning resources is consistent with the sort of reuse we see happening elsewhere on the internet. Rather than being structured to form larger wholes, individual bits of content are being remixed and repurposed to form new content objects, and these content objects are being used in what amounts to a rich multi-media based conversation. From the perspective of the learner, the learning resource is like a YouTube video or a Flickr image or any other type of content: something to be shared with friends and used to express ideas and points of view.

None of the metaphors, such as Legos or atoms, describe this version of modularity appropriately. I once used the metaphor of objects in an environment – like a horse and a palm tree – to describe modularity. Objects are not designed for each other, nor do they fit together in any particular way – they coexist in the same space, and each perceives the other in its own way. They share, if you will, the same information space – the palm tree reflects light waves, and the horse sees them. The objects function autonomously, connected, interacting, but not joined.

publishers sought greater control over distribution, seeking to license, rather than sell, content and software.

This prevented instructors from replicating online practices common in the typical classroom. No longer could newspaper clippings, articles or textbook chapters be distributed as handouts. No longer could video clips be shown or audio recordings be played to the class. The digitization of academic content was, at every turn, challenged by publishers.

In like manner, the use of educational software became a complex and expensive proposition for educational institutions. The cost of educational software rose, mergers and lawsuits limited competition, and customers were locked in to existing vendors by proprietary technology and the cost of conversion.

The argument in favour of strong intellectual property protection is that it fosters innovation. But our experiences over the last ten years show the paucity of such claims. The areas in which innovation has been fastest have been areas in which no effective patents held sway – HTML, CSS and Javascript, content management and syndication.

While court cases, protests and defiance have garnered the headlines, the most overwhelmingly popular response to proprietary content and technology has been the fostering and creation of free and open alternatives.

Free and open source software, as well as free and open content, have both been made possible through the development of licenses prohibiting the enclosure of such work in proprietary media. These licenses have been defended successfully in court.

A growing tide of opinion has begun to support the Open Access movement, driven largely by the argument that scientific research and educational content produced through government investments ought to be freely available.

Even if commercial publishers win strong copy protections from policy makers and technology companies, the trend toward free and open content will overwhelm them. As it stands, content producers are beginning to understand that it is better to allow their content to circulate freely, without restriction. This is because such content offers unequaled marketing and promotional opportunities, especially for new and not well recognized acts. Additionally, content syndication agencies, such as YouTube, are finding ways to recognize commercial content and allocate advertising revenue to the owners.

What should be understood, however, is that the bulk of educational content online will be free to access and reuse. It will be created by governments, foundations, companies and individuals, and will be permitted to freely circulate, used by students and instructors worldwide to support their own learning.

As with the market in open source software (and perhaps even more so) the commercial presence will be seen most of all through the provision of services. There are two major criteria for any educational good to obtain financial return in the marketplace: first, it cannot be something that can be digitally duplicated, for then the effective value per unit approaches zero; and second, it cannot be something that the users of that good or service could easily produce for themselves, for once again, the effective value per unit approaches zero.

Today, much of the value derived from the learning marketplace is based on an artificially imposed scarcity – a scarcity of seats in classrooms, a scarcity of credentialing agencies, and a scarcity of educational publications, for example. These scarcities will disappear as governments prefer to fund education directly, and at cost, rather than support such business models.

But in general, educational enterprises will have to be more creative in finding opportunities. Content providers will discover there are much larger markets to be had when they help people create their own content. This will be the basis for the educational marketplace of the future. In general, helping people provide for themselves – helping them, in other words, save time and money – will provide the best opportunities. Selling people cameras instead of pictures, for example. Course content creation kits instead of courses.

the major shift in instructional technology will be from systems centered on the educational institution to systems centered on the individual learner.

As a result, rather than the employment of a single system to accomplish all educational tasks, both instructors and learners will use a variety of different tools in combination with each other. These tools, as described above, will communicate with each other, and will support the acquisition and creation of learning content, as well as activities such as games or real-time collaboration.

In a sense, the platform of the future will do exactly the job assigned to the instructional management system of the past: “an instructional management system is the backbone motherboard into which all educational components are plugged.” This analogy remains apt today. However, with a proliferation of platforms, a central question emerges: who manages the platform?

Tracking and reporting are the major functions required of a learning management system today (and main reasons institutions want to keep using them). No matter what device a student is using, no matter where they access an online course, the LMS can report on what they have viewed (and reviewed), keep track of test scores and upload grades, and provide a secure, monitored location for in-class conversation and collaboration.

Future learning technology will need to support such functions, at least to some degree. The recognition of learning, whether by institutional certification, third-part testing, or community reputation, is to a significant degree a matter of reporting activities and achievement.

The popularity of social networks in recent years is only partially due to the desire to connect with others; it is also driven by a desire to shut out unwanted people and content.

As people become increasingly frustrated with unwanted content, the internet will resemble less a broadcast medium and more a person-to-person communications medium.

The two schools of thought identified in my earlier paper can still be seen today. On the one hand, there is a body of opinion that states that online learning is more expensive than traditional learning, that the average online course costs thousands of dollars to produce, and that specialized systems, such as simulations, even more so. And there is the other voice that points to the economics of reuse and suggests that online learning, in the long run, will save money.

Where online learning involves the development of courses, simulations, and other advanced software, development costs are very high.

On the other hand, if the work done to develop an online course serves merely to duplicate an in-person course already available to students, the expense seems questionable. Replicating classroom conditions is not the cheapest way to conduct learning online, and we become more experienced with the internet, alternatives emerge. A model of learning that puts much of the organization into the hand of students – such as is the case with the Massive Open Online Course being taught by George Siemens and myself – may prove to be much more cost-efficient.

Automation does not mean the end of teaching careers, though. What automation allows is (as I said ten years ago) a ‘deep personalization’ of learning. Automation allows us to more easily create and present content, to more easily form groups and collaborate, to more easily give tests and take surveys.

Myth: Online learning costs less than face-to-face training.