A Goad

I have a small confession to make. It is this: I am thoroughly dissatisfied with the quality of educational resources on the Internet. I say this both as a learner and as an educator. But before I go on too much more with this rant, I had better define what I mean by the role of a “learner”.

What Is a Learner?

For the purposes of this post, I will define a “learner” as somebody who has a question to which they want an answer. The question can be mundane, or abstruse, or anything in between.

A mundane question could be “When is the next bus to the middle of town due to leave from here?’. A more abstruse question could be “What are good mathematical tools for modelling three dimensional surfaces, and why are some other approaches impractical?”. If you don’t happen to understand the second question, that doesn’t matter: it merely serves to illustrate the abstruseness of the question.

The first question can be answered using Web 1.0 technology, typically by going to the web site of your local bus operator. Getting answers to questions of the second type sometimes leaves me tearing my hair out.

Issues!

I have yet to find an educator who is completely happy with all the existing online educational resources that are available to help them deliver a particular course. I hear instead a cacophony of complaint: “I do not have time to prepare resources to what I would regard as the miminum acceptable standard for my students (and there is nothing suitable that I can find on the Internet).”.

Using my question about modelling three dimensional surfaces as a starting point, I was initially confronted by a mass of seemingly unrelated facts: the linkages between them took a lot of figuring out. To make matters worse, different authors used different definitions for the same thing: it was only after thinking quite a lot about what these people were saying that I finally understood what was going on. A lot of time and frustration would have been saved if I had found a comprehensive online text on this subject; from what I can find, no such text exists, and I do not have the time to write such as text gratis. (I hear mutterings of “information curation” coming from readers of this post: I will return to this shortly.) I have had similar issues in another area of applied mathematics, as well as in other areas of human endeavour. You may have had similar experiences yourself.

I had heard about Web 3.0 (or “the Semantic Web”) with its promise of linking together pieces of information, so I poked around in this area. I found a motley collection of tools which, while I am sure that they are very good at doing what they each set out to do, between them offer nothing in the way of joining up the bits of information needed to answer my 3D question, and what is more to do it in such a way as to present all the information in a digestible order.

Just to make matters a little more exciting, we have Sir Ken Robinson’s prospect of individualised learning (as opposed the factory model of teaching), this aided and abetted by learners’ love affair with mobile devices.

Questions!

I will take it for granted that today’s learner expect to be able to ask a question, and to receive a comprehensive, well-informed and lucid reply in response regardless of the nature of the question that they asked. So …

1. What will it take to reach that position?
2. Who will be involved?
3. How long will it take?
4. Who will manage the process? (Educators? Corporations? Specialists? Individuals? Other?)
5. Will knowledge curation require subject specialists, or could it be automated? If so, to what extent?

If you feel inclined to respond to any of these questions, I, and perhaps future learners, will be very grateful to you.