MASHUP
LEARNING PLATFORM
Notice the difference? Obviously this is an extreme example and some learning platforms offer a lot more in the way of customisability and aggregation of multiple sources of information. But they ALL have a long way to go to reach my idea of the ideal.
In the quest to achieve what I want using the tools which are available, I have turned to the world of widgets. I had never realised what an explosion of widgets there has been recently. You can embed a widget for anything from creating your own penguin:
to evaluating the environmental impact of paper products:
Before very long we will be able to embed anything into anything else (mashup heaven!). Maybe learning platforms need not progress at all. Maybe they need to regress and simply become a widget canvas, pure aggregators of information - whether this be at the behest of the the user or the platform. A learning platform could intelligently assess the best information to provide to a particular user at a particular time in a particular context and pool this information together dynamically and in real-time. The technology is already here, but when will I see it on my desktop...
Good points and well made.
ReplyDeleteI think you can embed anything into anything now - you just need a bit of coding knowledge and a bit of patience. What you describe really is just a blank html page that you could copy and paste bits of code into easily.
Maybe all a learning platform really does is to automate some of the technicalities of it all. Hosting, storage, indexing, permissions that sort of thing. To look for it to be anything else might be wrong - we just want a decent front end editor for both content creation and site maintenance.
Have you ever come across Joomla? SImilar to Drupal just a CMS. Are LP providers essentially giving us a dressed up CMS that is deprived of functionality??