Wikipedia v Learning objects and repositories
A thought occurred to me during a discussion about problems about building up repositories of learning objects, ‘Would you care to share?’ At Alt-C 2006 Conference.
The thought was this –
- We have had the learning object economy repositories and Wikipedia for a similar(ish) time
- These repositories have not been a huge success at getting sharing. In the early days Google was the problem, but now also Wikipedia. If students want to get quick hyperlinked definitions (especially if their lecturers approve which I strongly believe they should) Wikipedia is where they will go.
- At a wild guess, tens of thousands of academics will be contributing, amending material to Wikipedia.
- Despite exaggerated fears, the quality of material on Wikipedia is remarkable high and very up-to-date.
So why has Wikipedia been such a success and the learning object economy, well…, been not particularly successful? Usually (and as repeated at Alt-c 2006) the reasons given for the difficulties in getting the learning object economy moving is that academics are for some reason uncollaborative or even secretive. I have never believed that. The reasons for lack of collaboration are primarily technological, institutional and developmental. The interface to the repositories are too complicated for the group of people (all academics) that we want to use them. Institutions (and the governments that control them) do not encourage cross-institutional collaboration because they are competitively positioned. Developmentally we haven’t found a way of getting collaboration to work.
But I think the success of Wikipedia proves that people (and academics) are far more collaborative then they are given credit for.
Wikipedia has collaboration and iteration built into its very structure, each major article will be the result of dozens or even hundreds of addition or iterations. The quality of the material on Wikipedia is not controlled by a rigorous time-delaying quality control procedure. If people think it is wrong they change it and because there is such high usage, quality is generally good.
So what can the learning object development learn from Wikipedia?
Find a way of making design and implementation iterative. OK, that’s not so easy if you want learning objects that are interactive. It will mean making iterative tools that everyone can get hold of and use (ideally web-based tools like wikis).
At the design stage, take away from the academic author the need to make the all-in-one definitive learning object on … whatever it is. Take away the fear from the author that what they produce has to be very good first time… or their reputation will be put to question. (For that matter why does the author have to be an academic anyway?). Find a way of designing collaboratively, through story-boarding or some other means, feeding off the widest expertise possible and in the widest forum. And why shouldn’t the forum be as wide as Wikipedia? No-one need spend more time contributing to a design of a learning object than they might spend editing Wikipedia.
At whatever stage people can run with whatever design they see and those various implementations of the design are linked to the evolving and bifurcating designs. Ultimately I don’t see any reasons why we shouldn’t have the tools to implement those designs through various templates of interactive material.
So instead of having an object suddenly appearing (or not appearing as is more usual now) with an invisible history, we have a shared and open history of the refinement of learning ideas.
A learning ideas repository. Must get the patent in, before Blackboard hear about it.
