Tata Interactive Systems

Wiki: Breaking the Knowledge Class Barrier

I know it sounds very “brave new world”, but my forays into the world of Wiki (Hawaiian for “quick”) and other social software have convinced me that something very brave and new is happening out there. In this world, phrases such as “new paradigm”, “the Next Big Thing”, “democracy in education”, and “hypertext on steroids” abound.

Of all the social software available, Wiki seems to have captured the imagination of a lot of people. A quick definition: Wiki is a piece of server software a software tool that allows users to freely create and edit hyperlinked Web pages using a web browser. Wiki implementations typically use a simple syntax for users to create new pages and cross links between pages on the fly. For more information, click here .

Big companies such as Motorola and SAP are using TWiki (a Wiki based tool) to design chips and develop software collaboratively by large teams spread across the globe. To read more on TWiki and its many success stories, click here .

Cloning Socrates

A student like Plato presupposes the presence of a teacher like Socrates—my non-elearning friend throws this at me as an unassailable argument in favor of the traditional learning methods.

Closer home, examples of the efficacy of the guru-shishya (teacher-student) tradition abound. The Upanishads (literally meaning “sitting near the guru”) and the Panchatantra (a collection of fables that elucidate issues such as ethics and strategy) have carried forward great wisdom through thousands of years.

The biggest challenge of e-learning to me, therefore, seems to be cloning the teacher and transporting him/her around the world, to be delivered on the remote computers of the e-learning users. There has to be a way of replicating the intense give-and-take and personal focus of one-on-one teaching to hundreds or thousands of students at a time.

Ubiquitous Learning. . .E-learning 2.0

Stephen Downes on E-learning 2.0, comprehending how we are changing the way we learn and what lies ahead in the field of e-learning.

What happens when online learning ceases to be like a medium, and becomes more like a platform? What happens when online learning software ceases to be a type of content-consumption tool, where learning is "delivered," and becomes more like a content-authoring tool, where learning is created? The model of e-learning as being a type of content, produced by publishers, organized and structured into courses, and consumed by students, is turned on its head. Insofar as there is content, it is used rather than read— and is, in any case, more likely to be produced by students than courseware authors. And insofar as there is structure, it is more likely to resemble a language or a conversation rather than a book or a manual.

The e-learning application, therefore, begins to look very much like a blogging tool. It represents one node in a web of content, connected to other nodes and content creation services used by other students. It becomes, not an institutional or corporate application, but a personal learning center, where content is reused and remixed according to the student's own needs and interests.