Imagine a school where a teacher walks into a classroom with thin plasma screens on the walls and inserts their java Id card into a wireless laptop, immediately the walls render posters and images relevant to the class that's about to start. The students enter and find themselves a wireless laptop and insert their cards which authenticates them to their individual portal learning environment. The teacher then progresses through the blended learning session moderating the online sessions and group work.

I'll be posting more on our next generation learning architecture later...

I'm listening to a great pod cast on from EdTechTalk on a proposed wikipedia for K-12 text books. In the world of educational technology podcasts this is not a new topic of discussion although there are some great ideas. This podcast struck me on 2 fronts, firstly the idea of print vs. digital resource in teaching and they format being used for this discussion. I'll get to the latter in a sec.

As a systems designer I try to model the concept in my head. I start with the notion that if you treat the student as an actor and the system boundary as the learning environment. Assuming the text book is issued to the student as part of the curriculum for a course they are enrolled, it should simple be represented as a non-digital resource with a relationship to the course that the student can access.

So what are the properties of a text book? Well, it's static and non-personal. It's also hugely expensive as was pointed out by all the discussion members but for the practical purposes of modeling that is somewhat irrelevant.

The wikipedia book is another beast completely. It is non-static and could be made to be personalized based on historical context of the learning environment in which the student has navigated the digital resources. It also can have complex relationships to the course, program, institution and existing resources (digital and non-digital).

The problem presents itself when you add assessment. If you map assessment targets to to the teaching resources you add a great deal of complexity to the system design. Assuming you want to assess all students using a static framework, we'll leave our personalized assessment, then you have to link the assessment targets to a some constant reference in the teaching resources.

Now onto my second point, What a fantastic format for a podcast! The session was a planned discussion using a combination of moderated online chatrooms and voice conference call with conversations bubbling up from the chat rooms and invited into the audio. I had planned for a similar format on the upcoming education commons and I can now see how well it works . Thank You. Truly Inspirational.

For more on the wikipedia project see http://Education Bridges.org