Lone Star Learning — Useful Web 2.0 Trends for Product Visioning in Education at XplanaZine

I’ve had the luck in life to see deserts, jungles, beaches and mountains. And with my general lack of direction, I’ve been lost in every single one of these environs. But, as any person whose done much orienteering can tell you, the mountains can pose some particularly nasty challenges when it comes to knowing where you are. The reason? It’s so darn hard to get perspective.

When you’re in the mountains, assuming you don’t have a topographical map, all of the peaks look the same. And, most often, you’re almost always in between multiple mountains at a time, big mountains that tend to block your access to the sun and other points that might help you in your orienteering.

In the summer of 1976, I was in the Rockies participating in a three-week mountain trek experience with other high school students. On day, we worked on rappelling off a nice cliff face. After we had all finished and gathered at the main camp, we realized one of the teams was missing. We blew our whistles and went out as far as we could before dark, but to no avail. We lit a huge bonfire that night, hoping they would be able to see it somehow. At first light the next morning, we went out looking again, and found them making their way back up the river towards our camp. It turned out that they had gone off in the wrong direction after the previous day’s exercises. They discovered they were lost when one of them realized they had been walking in circles. By then, it was almost dark.

I can still see one of the kids standing by the fire saying, “I could of sworn I knew where I was going. Then everything started looking the same. I couldn’t tell one mountain from another.” But after dark, he told us, when it started getting cold, the two of them looked up and saw the glow of our bonfire off in the distance. They knew they couldn’t try to make it back in the dark, but just knowing they weren’t truly lost and alone helped them make it through the miserable night without a fire or warm clothing.

Anyone who works in technology and/or education knows that feeling. It’s exactly like running around in circles in the middle of a mountain range. You’re so focused on the immediate challenges at hand, it’s easy to lose perspective. And the obstacles around you tend to block out some of the traditional points for fixing your position on the horizon.

In that spirit, I’d like to offer up a bit of a bonfire for those who haven’t had a chance to get their bearings recently. This is a list of current trends that are burning brightly enough to guide you as you try to plan products, curricula, or general school and company strategies. Hopefully, even if you’re feeling a bit directionless or depressed, these flames will provide some vision and excitement.

Mashups — Mashups are applications created by combining two or more other applications. Sites such as Google, Yahoo,or Flickr offer links their services through API’s (application program interfaces) that allow people to make new modular combinations. You can see examples of lots of mashups at Mashup Feed . One of my favorites, as I travel so much, is Weather Bonk . The point of mashups is that there are already more than enough applications out there. So, instead of reinventing the wheel, we should focus on reusing the popular applications others are already use. We should be thinking about quizzing and simulation engines with tie-ins to Google Maps, and Flickr, and LMS frameworks with feeds from Blogger, del.icio.us, and Yahoo Calendar. Mashups extend beyond, technology, however. The idea is also suited to our curricula, our textbooks, and our very notion of school structure.
Rip/Mix/Burn — Students have changed. Yes, let me repeat that. They have already changed. This isn’t some gradual evolutionary process we’re talking about. This is a fait accompli. What they have evolved into is an entity that prefers to personalize and customize everything. They are a multi-tasking lot who take what is given them and re-mix it to suit their needs. This is the first generation that is really engineered to accept the classroom as a laboratory for experimentation and discovery. The more we try to constrain them with homogeneous learning strategies the worse out results will be.
Community — The old way of doing things treated people as isolated agents in a fairly static system. Today, the fastest growing phenomenon on the Web is social networking. If you products and pedagogical models don’t embrace community, you’re pretty much stuck. Particularly where Internet applications and curricula are concerned, folksonomy tagging needs to be instituted across the board.
Distributed Content — Finally, whatever you’re working on, remember that it will need to be distributed. Our constituencies have lost most of their interest when it comes to going to centralized places to get things. They want it whenever and wherever they are. That means reducing all information and learning content to the smallest valuable size possible and making it distributable in multiple formats. If you hope to ever see the light of day, it’s something you’ll definitely want to do in the planning stages rather trying to retrofit your solution.