Inspired by David Brooks's call for people to identify philosophical traditions that can underpin new ideas, I wonder what tradition best supports education conducted in the open. The problem is that our conceptions and processes for how to teach are firmly pre-Web; the lecture, transmission of knowledge from expert to novice; the course pack. Most learning management systems like Blackboard rely on these outmoded ideas.
But what's to replace them? How do we move toward a fully Web-immersed educational experience in which the teachers learn from the students and the students learn from each other? This is what we do not know, and so we slowly lurch along. Generations hence people will be amazed that we mostly used the Web as a more convenient delivery vehicle for traditional types of content. We didn't think big, and they will notice.
The problem may be, as Brooks argues, that there are no abstract principles guiding our quest toward a new way of learning. So as a first marker I throw in communitariasm as the philosophy underlying our emerging practice. I might change my mind many times until settling on a particular stance, but that is part of the process.
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