Walter Hutchens’ Blog

Reading about Drupal, an open-source content management system that I’m thinking about using for some classes I teach, I came across the following provocative quote:

Back in the day we thought that we should be able to produce “content” which would fit seamlessly into the “lesson” and the “course” - and the “brand” of the producer or client company.

Fact may well turn out to be that the concepts of “lesson” and “course” are the ones that inevitably must change, so that they can accommodate new media forms without these superficial signs of cohesion. [Link to source]

I found it on a site titled Thesis in Progress in a piece labeled “Popular Culture,” attributed to “ravi” (about whom no further information is given). The quoted part is ravi’s conclusion for the piece.

I liked this for a few reasons. First, the quote offers a pithy taxonomy of what we might call “organized education.” It posits the current hierarchy as: institutional brand/course/lessons. It is useful to lay bare the fundamental structure in complex systems. Perhaps an even more apt taxonomy for organized higher education is: institution/field of study/course/lesson.

I also liked the invitation (or challenge) to think about how new media will impact organized education, suggesting change at a radical level is possible.

But what will the “facts . . . turn out to be?” What degree of change is likely?

Surely courses should change “to accommodate” new media. There’s a vast amount of room for development there. Ravi’s essay has some interesting ideas about how new media and pop culture can help people learn foreign languages.

But will “courses” be done away with because they are “superficial signs of cohesion?” That strikes me as going way overboard.

I love auto-didactic surfing. Whatever happens in classrooms, it is clear that’s how lots of learning is occurring now. It makes obvious good sense to re-imagine how traditional courses operate in this world of disintermediation, new media and social technologies.

But I don’t think the idea of a “brand” in the sense of an institutional provider of educational will go away. Nor do I think the “artificial” segmentation of the world into digestible, focused segments called “courses” (with some occasional further segmentation into “lessons”) will be abandon, either. Change is likely within these traditional concepts; their overthrow is not.

Some cohesion is helpful and even necessary for learning, no? To take the extreme case: no cohesion, no language. Surfing lets me ignore narrow, imposed boundaries, but surfing requires the cohesion of search terms or and linked content. Much of what’s great about the web is the way it lets people create nearly immediate cohesion of what otherwise would be dispersed actors and points of information.

Education needs both cohesion and freedom. I enjoy making unexpected connections, but I find that often I learn the most when “grokking” on a particular topic–drilling down rather than surfing in a less focused way.

I like to study “subjects” or “topics” and expect us to continue to organize education into courses and lessons—not because we are slaves to imposed, false “signs of cohesion” but because relatedness helps us learn and digest fragments of the world.