Introduction
For a long period of human history we had one main tool for remembering things – our brains. If we needed information that was critically important, we either had to have it in our heads or we had to be standing next to someone who did. This meant that if I, as a teacher, was meant to teach someone something, a fairly large chunk of what I had to do was get things in your head. In order to try and ensure that stuff was in your brain, we’ve developed methods of assessing you that involve you, by yourself, proving that you’ve shoved those important things into your brain. Sure… education has always been about more than that, but a sizeable part has simply been about making you you remember things that you might need later.
A fair amount of very good educational literature has talked about collaborative learning – particularly over the last 100 years or so. But from a teacher’s perspective, you still needed to be responsible for all the other voices in the room. Whether the rest of the voices were represented by a book or by your ‘experience’ or ‘expertise’ you, as a teacher, needed to have it prepared in advance to bring to the classroom to allow for collaborative learning to happen. If the conversation diverged from your specialty or away from the materials on hand… you were cooked. For a long time, then, we needed to think of ‘curriculum’ as separate from ‘subset of people thinking about certain kinds of things’ for practical reasons. Organizing access to hundreds or thousands of people who are thinking a certain thing, summarizing it, editing it, printing it on paper, putting it on a truck – these things take time.
Broadly speaking, when we think about learning, we have some foundational questions we all want to have answered when looking into a given field like:
- What have people thought of this particular concept before?
- Are there general agreements about how you might think about something?
- Are there good/best practices?
- What mistakes have others made?
Jamming these things into a textbook or collection of books was much more efficient than trying to organize travel for thousands of people to come and talk to a classroom. Our goals are mostly the same now as they were in the ‘print it/drive it around era’ – help someone be an effective member of a given discipline. Help them be understood in that discipline. Help them to make decisions in that discipline. Ideally, help them to become a member of that discipline. And those disciplines have changed along with the communications technologies that have changed mine. Whether you’re a historian, a mechanic or a pilot – life is different than it was 30 years ago.
I think that the scale and the abundance of the internet has changed how we can/should go about it.
Now that we have access to those thousands of people, to those mistakes, and best practices through the internet the community of learning can be the curriculum of a course. A course can be designed so that each of you will