Content as infrastructure makes sense… and succinctly represents the kind of argument I was making.

I think Stephen is right as well– the kind of infrastructure matters. If sharing whole courses or sharing through the OCWC umbrella or sharing through some kind of aggregated portal– if sharing “just” content in any form– were all that we were doing, I’d feel more appropriately called out. But we’ve been pushing to open up the entire educational process with our faculty for years… the OCWC content is one part of that effort. And to be fair, the OCWC doesn’t make any kind of mandate that even those “courses” that *are* shared through them must be shared in some particular manner.

And that’s not even to get into the differences between what *I* individually can do, what faculty I work with are enabled to do, and what our organization is doing. They overlap considerably, but we are trying to push past constraints, not create more!

It’s one thing to be wired for cable television. There’s content, but that’s about it. It’s quite another thing to be wired for an internet connection. Now ‘professional’ content is a small bit of it – and what’s really interesting is the fact that I can create and share with my friends and with people around the world.

‘Content as infrastructure’ pretty much describes what I might term ‘learning frameworks’. I think we are approaching the same issue form different perspectives. The user should not have to worry about who built the roads or frameworks. All she needs to know is that there is some way for her to appraich the discipline. The millions of Google results provide essentially no guidance. (I’m assumning she is not prepared to spend thousand of hours researching and evaluating these results.)

A ‘learning framework’, to my mind, requires context: your people, content, system. I beleive it has to offer some actual substance, but also enough choice/freedom to create their own context. (A learning object repository with practitioners and a broader community can do that. I’m erm, indebted to you again.)

And while I applaud the OER movement and beleive it will come to fruition, I’ve seen that, in the interim, people are willing to pay for learning frameworks that save then time and frustration and offer motivation, etc. (The different perspective.)

I blogged about this issue in more detail on Nov 4th:
http://ken-carroll.com/2008/11/04/learning-frameworks/