I’m all ears if anyone wants to recommend a direction for reusability.org blogs.

(This post should have trackbacked to http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2004/05/its_about_time.shtml but for some reason Mena has turned Trackback off for the page. Take a look at the bottom and you’ll understand why…)

My wife and I have been reading the Old Testament a few pages each night for the last five years or so, off and on. Over the Thanksgiving holiday we finally finished the it (not only have I read the entire Old Testament, I?ve read it all out loud). Maybe it?s just the holidays causing me to wax nostalgic, but I found myself thinking about the ?progress? civilization has made in the intervening years since the books Old Testament were authored.

(This entry does have a point (I?ll get to it at the bottom)? it just doesn?t have anything to do with Instructional Technology.)

Where is our society now as compared to then? I?m specifically interested in the rules and mores that govern behavior. For an snapshot of the Old Testament world, let?s take something basic and probably familiar like the ten commandments. Here they are in all their King James glory:

• Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.
• Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.
• Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
• Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.
• Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
• Thou shalt not kill.
• Thou shalt not commit adultery.
• Thou shalt not steal.
• Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
• Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.

It seems like the ?progress? of western civilization is, now-a-days, measured in terms of the number of these commandments which it is now socially acceptable and, in an increasing number of cases, perfectly legal, to violate. I?ll regroup the ten commandments according to what I (with biases) perceive to be their current status in the US.

Clearly socially acceptable and legal:

Worshipping someone other than God, Making idols, Taking the name of the Lord in vain, Working on the Sabbath day, Coveting.

Possibly socially acceptable and legal:

Dishonoring parents, Adultery.

Clearly socially unacceptable and illegal:

Killing, Stealing, Lying.

A number of finer distinctions could be made. For example, if adultery is understood to mean sex outside of marriage, it definitely belongs in the clearly socially acceptable category. If it means sex with someone other than the person to whom you are married, it may be still be socially unacceptable. As another example, killing is clearly socially acceptable and legal in some circumstances (abortion).

Either way, there seems to be a trend in the data here. Over the years it becomes socially acceptable, and finally legal, to break the old rules. I imagine readers of my blog could not imagine a time when it was illegal to work on Sunday, and would consider a nation who still held to such a law ?archaic? or ?outdated.?

It all makes me wonder, and this is the whole point of this entry, where does the sliding stop? How long will it be until killing, stealing, and lying are socially acceptable, and finally, legal? Ten years? Fifty years? One hundred years? Two hundred and fifty years? Historical bias may cause you to say: killing, stealing, and lying should never be socially acceptable or legal. But in so saying, you would be guilty of the same narrow-mindedness that plagued early believers who thought their current system should remain unchanged.

Can this slow softening of traditional morality be called progress? Who can say? In my own biased opinion, I would argue that ?recent? changes in the way our society views women and their equality with men are extremely positive. But what would the ancients have said? Unless one is willing to admit that a supreme being can provide the foundation for such decisions, are we left to pin our morals to continuously negotiated and renegotiated social contract?

The AFV is an alternative designed to maximize the power of individual choice, while working with the full potential of technology. Whereas the copyright system provides a state-enforced monopoly leading to enormous costs, inefficiencies and enforcement problems, the AFV provides a voucher system for creative workers that would lead to savings to consumers, taxpayers and the government. Lower advertising costs, an end to police or FBI crackdowns on students downloading music, and less monitoring by internet service providers of their customers are just a few examples of savings from the AFV system.

The full paper is available at “http://www.cepr.net/AFV.htm”:http://www.cepr.net/AFV.htm

We now have ample data to show that:
– Training does not work.
– eLearning does not work.
– Blending Learning does not work.
– Knowledge Management does not work.

Although it will seem uncharacteristic, I’m not sure how I feel about the piece. Some of it must certainly be true… the question is, how much?

• Wayne Hodgins is talking about MOTO (metadata, objects, taxonomies, and ontologies), standards and specifications (IEEE, IMS, SCORM, etc.), and mass contribution for mass personalization.
• Andy Gibbons is talking about the fact that all instructional designs are multilayered constructions and that we need to articulate and better understand those layers (content, strategy, interface, representation, etc.)
• Dave Merrill is talking about getting back to basics with his idea of first principles and five star ratings (real-world problem, activate prior knowledge, present / demonstrate, allow practice and provide feedback, promote integration and transfer).
• Stephen Downes and the edubloggers are talking about making finding and connecting easier through syndication technologies like RSS, hooking things up to OAI, and exploring what can happen when you harvest lots of interesting data.
• Brent Lambert is talking about the semantic web and necessary changes to learning objects themselves and their metadata to allow inferences and other instructionally useful computations to be made over distributed content collections.
• Mike Hannafin and Janette Hill are talking about resource-based learning environments (RBLEs) in which the main job of the designer / instructor is to identify interesting problems, correctly select and configure resources to support their solutions, and support students in the problem-solving process.
• I am still talking about informal learning in online social groups supported by digital resources and communications tools, and right to education issues (if I didn?t think my stuff was interesting, who would?).

After some thought, I think there are some interesting trends emerging here. I?m only dumping this to the blog before making slides because I don?t know that I?ve heard anyone describe a grouping of future -ilities like this.

• Separability ? delivery media independent representations of content which can be compiled at need-time for a specific platform (web, print, phone, pda, desktop, IM, &c.)
• Computability ? taxonomical / ontological information captured in metadata to support inferencing, computation, and topical recommendation (semantic web, &c.)
• Sociability ? conversation as learning context, weak connections to multiple interest groups, spontaneous connections to transient interest groups, social recommendation of content
• Sharability ? content simple to find, create, and access (MIT/OCW, blogs, RSS/OAI, Trackback)
• Helpability ? content and conversations sought and engaged at need-time

As USU students would say, since I have chocolate hammer everything looks like a chocolate nail. However, I think these trends interact favorably with our current projects. Individually explicating the themes will take some time, and describing the soup that results from mixing them in a medium heat sauce pan for 8 minutes will take even longer (and consequently will have to wait for another time).