David Wiley explains it (almost) all to you

David Wiley's 1000-word contribution to the cool Change: Edu, learning & tech course offers a lot of leverage on seminal events in learning technology that took place in the late 1990s and early 2000s: 

Many learning objects researchers and funding agencies were pushing to fully automate the selection and assembly of learning objects, essentially driving all human participation in the design of instruction (and all human interaction during learning) out of the educational experience, because humans are too “expensive.”

....Of course, the universal, ambient assumption underlying the reusability paradox is that learning objects must be used “as is” due to their copyright status. This realization allowed me to connect my passion for openness to my academic work on learning objects. From 2004 until today I continue to focus a good portion of my thinking and work on open educational resources – “learning objects with an open license.”

Mr Wiley's smart, committed and compassionate approaches to learning have, incidentally, given him a unique perspective on the history of educational technology in American and worldwide. However, his presentation of this perspective on the past isn't entirely comprehensive, which begs questions about the forces underlying the key issues that educationists are grappling with today.

The learning-objects/learning-automation nexus that Mr Wiley describes was driven, flogged even, by billions of dollars that were injected into education-technology by the US Dept of Defense. DoD was mesmerized by precisely the learning-object problem that Mr Wiley points out: How to design, tag, store and serve LOs that could be re-used to create compelling content cost effectively and on the fly. DOD funded among other things the Advanced Distributed Learning lab, which drove--flogged, even--the development of SCORM (Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model), a specification for making LOs shareable by lots of different Learning Management Systems, and one of the bedrocks of interoperability among today's LMSs, Virtual Learning Environments and other platforms. SCORM was, especially because it provided an early rule-set for XML, the mother of all standards (in online learning). 

Well and good. Mr Wiley's and others' work on LOs in the 90s and 00s walked the discussion away from military training and over to K12 and higher education—although the US military's emphasis on automation and cost savings can still be discerned in the configuration of Virtual Learning Environments and their resources. 

But we need to perform due diligence in relation to the origins of OERs, by traveling back up the roots of our current discussions of open content to better understand the underlying forces and actors that are driving that conversation as well. Why have OERs emerged at this time as critical, or potentially critical, means of improving education? How is the emergence of OERs similar to the emergence of LOs/automation? How different? 

Banned websites impede learning

The Times' portrayal of Banned Websites Awareness Day, an offshoot of Banned Books Week,  (brought to you by the American Association of School Librarians!) demonstrates among other things that in savvy schools the Internet, computers and social media have become thoroughly intertwined with students' learning and with student-teacher interactions. 

The article highlights different activities supporting unrestricted Internet and social-media access in schools, including email campaigns, debates over the pros and cons of censorship (Would you want your kid accessing Tea-Party websites at school?) and, at New Canaan HS in Connecticut, a 'social-media solidarity blackout.' The upshot of the blackout? 

“It’s not even lunchtime, and I’m already dying,” said Michael DeMattia, 17, a senior, who carries a laptop to school.

In his Advanced Placement Biology class, where lab groups have created a Facebook thread to collaborate and share data, he could not log in. In honors comparative literature, his classmates were unable to show a YouTube video during a presentation.

The Internet, Michael said, has “made cooperation and collaboration inside and outside of class much better and faster,” adding, “It’s really has become an integral part of education.”

Indeed. 

Just so we're clear, Michael is talking about using social media in his AP biology class and his honors comp-lit class. A lot of kids—a lot—aren't enrolled in classes or in schools where their teachers have the skills, support and opportunities (including access to hardware, prep time and professional development) to integrate FB, Twitter, YouTube or other trending tools. 

But the critical quote, underplayed perhaps in the middle of the article, is the teacher who frames the real reason that web censorship is self-defeating: 

Deven Black, a librarian at Middle School 127 in the Bronx, also said that filters had blocked a range of useful Web sites.... “Our job is to teach students the safe use of the Internet. And it’s hard to do that if we can’t get to the sites.”

Would you want your kid accessing Tea Party websites without critical-thinking skills?