XplanaZine

When Yahoo announced a week ago that it was buying Flickr, an online photo-sharing site, it made lots of sense to me. It made sense partly because once big companies reach a certain size, they can innovate through external acquisition more easily than they can through internal R&D. The move also seemed logical because Flickr represents a proven model for focusing on things people like to post and share and then finding the best way to provide a framework for that activity.

In many ways, the Yahoo purchase is reminiscent of Google buying Blogger. Blogging is also about creating personal content and sharing it conveniently through a social network. Blogger’s focus was also a direction that meshed nicely with Google’s efforts and one in which they weren’t moving at the time of the purchase.

Underneath it all, what Yahoo and Google are really competing for is our tagging dollars. They are purchasing popular frameworks for content distribution and betting that, through these purchases, they can own at least a piece of the social network marketplace. Drilling down a bit further, they are both making a pitch to own all or part of the mechanisms involved in packaging and distributing content on the Web.

This is all very interesting for those of us in education whether we use Flickr or Blogger or not. We, too, are in a focused war over social networks and content packaging and distribution. In our case, the battles are taking place in the Learning Object Repository and LMS platform arenas. Institutions, individuals, and large companies are providing tools and full applications for packaging and distributing digital content, and most are hoping that theirs will be the winning paradigm when all is said and done.

So, what’s really at stake? Just something as big as the Dewey Decimal system for the new generation.

Today, a teacher or student can walk into any library and, because they all use the same classification and ordering system, find whatever book he or she needs. Not only are the books ordered in the same way, but library search tools are also fairly uniform as they are based on a common system. Librarians can be trained at any university offering a library science degree and go work at any library and feel comfortable.

Just as important, over time the ordering and cataloguing system has developed a symbiotic relationship with the content it orders. Increasingly, book writers and publishers have tailored their content preparation (sections and subsections) in order to take complete advantage of its power.

Now, let’s get back to the new order, or the one that is trying to evolve. Like it or not, we are becoming a digital society, especially in terms of education.

[An aside: Of course, you may have been like me five years ago and said that it would take forever before DVD’s could replace our VHS tapes. Been to a Blockbuster store lately? No VHS tapes.]

We are moving rapidly towards a time in which the vast majority of all educational content will be digital and not analog. The problem is that there is no Dewey Decimal system for this and no universal structures yet exist for making “books” (i.e. digital content) that are optimized for whatever organizing system finally emerges.

[Another aside: Obviously, I am presenting a simplistic view of the digital content universe here. Some of you may already be asking, “What about SCORM”? or “What about Dublin Core?” We will get to these things in good time. The purpose of this introduction is to get everyone on the same page, and to let the “non-initiated” enter into the discussion.]

All of this is not to say we aren’t getting close. It’s just that we have a ways to go. For the rest of this week, I will be writing about different aspects of this evolution in educational content. In each article, I will take a look at a particular aspect of the digital content revolution, some of the technologies and players involved, and the gap that exists between where we are and where we need to go. Tomorrow, we will look at The Taxonomy Gap. On Wednesday, we’ll explore The LOR Gap. On Thursday, I’ll discuss The Distribution Gap, and on Friday I’ll wrap things up with an essay on Where We Go from Here.

The reality is that we have many gaps to fill before the “digital age” can become a reality in reduction. I’d like to close by pointing to some of them.

1. There is a gap between what teachers can do and what they need to do regarding digital content;
2. There is a gap between what current online content creation tools allow us to (and how easy they are to sue) and what we need to be able to do;
3. There is a gap between how digital content users and digital content creators organize their assets in education;
4. There is a gap between the flexibility we have in sharing our personal digital assets (music, photos) and our educational assets;
5. There is a gap between the real and perceived value of the intellectual property of the average teacher;
6. There is a gap between between the individual and the community.