Is this the future of interactive, collaborative online courses?

Tina Brown’s new online vessel, the Daily Beast, has just launched, with the philosophy that means it is not an aggregator, but rather in Tina’s words, a site that  ”sifts, sorts, and curates.” What this means is that it provides a variety of ways to intersect with a story, and entry points to interact with it too. A range of invited experts on the  ‘buzz board’ give their recommendations on a range of topics including foreign affairs, entertainment and politics; highlights from other news sources provide the ‘cheat sheet’.

There is one ‘big fat story’ of the day which provides roll overlinks organised a bit like a mental map of the story. All of this is dynamic and updating constantly. The home  page is too cluttered and confusing  for my taste,but the other pages are much cleaner with lots of white space and clean design, with big images and a pleasing grey font that is easy on the eye.

For me Tina’s philosophy chimes exactly with where I think education, especially higher education and lifelong  learning, is going. We are shifting from the top down model of teacher/student to the bottom up model of collaboration and equality, and of guide, mentor, curator and collector. This resonates with Michele Martin who in a post on Instructional Designers and Trainers as Digital Curators? argues that  the

‘role of the “trainer” or the “instructional designer” really is fundamentally changing into someone who may no longer be designing learning “events” but is in fact facilitating the development and ongoing use of personal learning and work environments’

and Steve Rubel, who in  ‘The digital curator in your future’ maintains that

‘The call of the curator requires people who are selfless and willing to act as sherpas and guides. They’re identifiable subject matter experts who dive through mountains of digital information and distill it down to its most relevant, essential parts. Digital Curators are the future of online content.’

So something like the Daily Beast, with a core team of ‘curators’ mixed in with invited experts to give fresh and deep insights into the subject area, and then combined with interaction from the participants adding their links, uploads and insights provides a powerful model for what an online course site might look like in the future…..

you can register here 

the abstract is here

Blogs form a vital part of the collaborative space in which postgraduates interact with each other and with tutors and industry professionals; operating as the core of the learning circle, connecting and interlinking its stages and transforming practical assignments into an Schonian repertoire of experience that prepares the student for professional practice. Their real time nature and the seamless mashing up of ideas, reflections, images, links and emotions of the blogging format create the foundations for a future generation of E-flective Practitioners.

This presentation discusses how the School of Media at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, uses blogs alongside synchronous interactions using the Wimba classroom to map the participants learning journey on the course in both full time face-to-face and fully online part time modes, and to build a collaborative community of practice on the course.

Blogs act as a conduit of connected knowledge between the teaching staff and the cohort, offering an unparralled insight into the working methodologies, influences, problems and successes of the group in real time in a way traditional tutorial forms cannot replicate.

The Media School targets mature students who are mid-career professionals looking to deepen and extend their practice, or who are looking to gain the skills and methodological toolbox to operate as professionals in the media and related areas.

Through student feedback and analysis of the role of blogs on the course, the course team identified several key features of blogs, identifying both the strengths and potential problem areas; and how they map onto Schon’s concepts of reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action: