Education is changing, and in a BIG way.

Traditionally, education has been a top-down information delivery system with knowledge locked behind the doors of educational institutions. This knowledge is disseminated as a curriculum through courses conducted by instructors. The act of learning and acquiring this information requires a large commitment of time from the learner, which is usually spent at the institutions harboring this knowledge.

Then, along comes the web. Now the whole paradigm of education and learning is beginning to shift. A massive conversation is taking place on the web. This conversation is not merely an exchange of words, but a communication of information in all forms. The culture of information, as found on the web, has become a bottom-up construct where individuals contribute to a larger conversation. This type of phenomenon is illustrated vividly in the realm of political blogs.

Here is an image that represents a large number of the political blogs that link to each other. You can probably figure out what the red and blue colors represent.

http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/2005/AdamicGlanceBlogWWW.pdf

These blogs connect to each other through linking. This mass amount of linking creates a collective consciousness facilitating conversations of political philosophies inherent to the group.

This is how I see education manifesting itself in the future: learning facilitated through a mass conversation. The representation of this conversation will be similar to, for example, the conversation of the ‘blue state’ blogs that have formed a community around their beliefs and ideas. This network of knowledge and conversation, centered on a common topic and interest, is a powerful construct where the individuals have control of the discourse. The tools of this conversation are blogs, wikis and RSS feeds. The power of this conversation is the network created through the linking of what is essentially personal publication platforms.

I predict there will be great resistance to this fundamental change in education, especially from the major stake holders of the institutions. A bottom up model of learning is not controlled by Presidents, Provosts, Deans and Program Directors. It may still be guided by them, and definitely will benefit from their influence, but the future of e-learning will transfer more control of the learning process into the hands of the learner.

And that, I think, is a good thing.