This comment on Weblogg-ed by Alan Levine jumped out at me;
It just goes to show that despite pontification about being "learner centered" or "student centered" most institutions, systems, and course management monstrosities are still stuck in the "course" being the basic unit of organization, rather than the student.
It seems pretty clear; the basic unit of learning is the person. This person is indivisible. All learning activities, products and strategies must be centered around the person. We can then go on to develop environments for many people, but the individual is the building block – not the learning object, the course, the programme, or the institution. All of these are temporary organisations that the individual may use, or be part of.
The power of search engines, blogs, wikis, aggregators and other low threshold access tools is that they give control back to the learner. But we don’t have many good design models for the creation of real learner-centric environment. Most of our models are prescriptive, but there is a lot of work being done by Jay Cross, Don Morrison, ISPI and many others, to address this need. These are exciting times for learning professionals who are willing to explore new models with some empowering new tools.
