Multilitteratus Incognitus

Anytime a bozo takes the stage and proclaims something radical it seems to stir up the educational community. In similar vain an article circulated the interwebs a few weeks ago about David Wiley who is getting a ton of publicity over his comments that College will be obsolete by 2020 . I suppose in David's case bad press is good press.... In any case his idea that colleges will be obsolete by 2020 revolve around the idea that technology such as podcasts, videos on services like you tube, e-Learning and m-Learning, communities of practice and freely available content will replace how people gain knowledge. Don't get me wrong. I love technology and all that it can do to help in education, but let's be serious, we won't be replacing colleges with downloadable podcasts any time soon. The reason you go to college is not just to get an information dump. If that were the case colleges would have close down ages ago because people would be going to free public libraries for ...

I was reading this blog post earlier this month about the collapse of the TR-DEV community of practice on an eLearning blog. Now Communities of Practice (or CoP) is something of an interest to me. In the MBA program I viewed it from the lens of enabling employees to share knowledge within the company. In the Instructional Design program I've created a CoP of faculty, students and alumni as a space to meet outside of class to share ideas, comment on each others work for feedback purposes and share any good jobs that come along. In my personal life I am a member of several boards to keep up with advances in different technologies. Now, what happens when the board owner or owner of a CoP decides to call it quits? Who owns this data? Can someone in good conscience just delete the CoP like the TR-DEV list did? For example, I am a member of the NewtonTalk community which deals with all issues Newton ( apple newton that is). The list has been active for a decade now and there is lots of...