An email newsletter showed in my box from ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2004. Not sure how it got here but I scrolled down and found an interesting interview with Wayne Hodgins, inventor of “learning objects,” on his concept of me-learning. He is also the Director of Worldwide Learning Strategies at Autodesk, As he explains, “the "grand vision" or future of learning I am championing is the state when every person on the planet experiences personalized learning experiences every day.”
This vision is based on the ability to provide mass customized or personalized learning that is highly effective and very efficient. Wayne adds, “Context is what is required to transform essentially meaningless data into useful information by making it relevant to the person(s) consuming it. Context is also the most critical factor for successful learning.”
He then nicely defines knowledge and the unique context in which it occurs. “Knowledge is data put to work when it is applied by people and technology to solve problems. As each problem and each person is truly unique, then the ideal state we want to reach is to have every collection of data, technology, people, etc. to be "just right" to match the characteristics of the situation. By definition then each such solution would be unique because that specific collection of data, people, technology, etc. would have never existed before.”
Next he gets more specific and says that the impediments to sharing or re-using information are the high cost, time, and difficulty of reformatting, re-categorizing, editing out examples that are irrelevant to the new situation, and integrating it all to match the unique aspects of this situation. Wayne says, “The key is to have structured data that is broken down into small individual blocks of information, each one tagged with appropriate metadata so they can be discovered and selected to match the requirements at hand and then assembled into a "just right" package of content.”
Wayne is giving a giving a keynote in ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN (December 1 - 3) and discuss "me-learning: What if the impossible isn't?" I guess advertising this event is the point of the newsletter that came to me. I think Wayne asks a good question and offers a potential way to make it happen. This is something many others have talked about for a while. Is it the alchemists’ quest or really achievable?
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