As recently as 10 years ago, textbooks really were the first and last words in the curriculum. What a textbook said, and in what order, drove almost entirely the way people learned about a particular subject – from reading to math to health to science, etc. Under this framework, curriculum and pedagogy made learning a very controlled journey. A geology textbook would decide whether you learned about sedimentary rocks or igneous rocks first, and when to show you a picture of the Grand Canyon and when to show you a picture of an erupting volcano.
Things have loosened since then. CD-ROMs and Web sites produced by educational publishers provided learners with the opportunity to bounce around a subject – but only within the boundaries defined ahead of time by the publishers. Now, we live in a hybrid world where textbooks and interactive media are packaged together. But, the value they attempt to provide is much the same as it was ten years ago – a defined and architected approach that directs students through material.
It seems to me the Web is poised to blow this wide open. More and more high quality content is moving to the Web and more people are combining and presenting it in unique and varying ways. All of this new content is just a search a way. In this world, people won’t stay inside any single bounded presentation of a subject. They will read something. It will spark a thought. They will type that thought into the search box and be off on their own journey – not one that was programmed for them.
This radically changes the way we need to think about curriculum and pedagogy. Now, it is not so much that we need to teach people a subject. We need to teach them to search. We need to make it easier for them to evaluate what they find. And finally, we need to give them the tools to collect and knit together this unbounded journey into their own unique and individual curriculum.
“The tide of web 2.0 use has flooded over the campus walls an it’s too late to stop it, so embrace it. There comes a point where bottom up becomes so compelling that it becomes the new top-down.” Donald Clark
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