Sharing Nicely

David Wiley spoke of content as infrastructure at the recent UNU/UNESCO conference on higher education, “Pathways towards a shared future”. The idea resonates with my own thoughts on how we can engage with content, and what tools might support this engagement. In traditional education was characterised by a process of combining and pulling together; content, students, teachers, and the activity of learning and teaching all come together in the class room (or on campuses). Hoewever in the web 2.0 world, a set of simple/flexible/open tools can provide the glue that holds together the different pieces that make up education. Content becomes modularised, and can be distributed across many different servers. Discourse happens across blogs, where everyone is reader, writer, and editor. Assessment becomes a distributed set of opinions held by peers – the reputation an individual enjoys within a community of practice.