The NSF initiative is a good start but since it is government and it is subject to political influences and of course the inevitable delays, it could very well be another decade before we start to see truly compelling content for the LMS and other systems the NSF is seeking. I’m less interested in “cyberlearning” than in just plain old learning. The country has spent billions on wiring classrooms and providing laptops and broadband service, yet our educational system is still broken and we still only graduate 70% of high school students and of those that do graduate, the majority are not prepared for college or the workforce. I am all for cyberlearning if it will help in plain old learning, but so far, there is little evidence that without decent content and decent teachers we will ever see the Internet or other technologies make our kids better educated. The fact that kids can remain riveted to their keyboard for hours and hours a day and can play video games for an equal amount of time tells us that it isn’t their attention span, it’s the content. I have known kids that can’t identify the vice-president of the United States or identify Wyoming as a state, yet they can rattle off batting statistics for every player in the National League. It’s not their ability to learn, it’s their motivation to learn and unless the “cyber-content” is compelling you’ll never get them to put down the video controller and take the time to explore the chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen that makes water.

It’s the 21st Century.

Education, in its broadest sense, has covered a lot of ground and many ideas have been revisited since the first flint and tablet.

The best way to appear to innovative when resurrecting an old idea (that people explored decades ago) is to give it a new name. Few people will remember when the old idea was discussed and explored. Many won’t necessarily be old enough to have known about it.

Besides, postmodernism eschews the grand narrative. That’s to say, nobody wants to know the history of any past invention or idea any more. They don’t really want to know about the origins.

So a new name is just the ticket.

Pity about the name.

What a waste, to have academics doing “research,” only to come up with sources like this one:

Wiener, N. (1948). Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Guys, it was a cool book in ’48, but its current relevance is questionable.