David - Great post and a very important topic here on our campus. There are lots of smart people doing great things with platforms all over the University - finding new ways to engage students with blogs, social networks, and all sorts of other great tools. What I see lacking is the innovative use of these tools as instructional design and delivery tools. Faculty who routinely use these environments use them in an activity form - not as the vehicle for delivering course content. They use them to engage students in and out of the classroom, but not to design and deliver courses . . . perhaps when they start to understand more fully how the environments work we'll see a new breed of content exposed via the social web.
What frustrates me is the notion that our own eLearning spaces are both closed and built on old infrastructure. I have many conversations all over our University with people who say open is good, but when push comes to shove, they ask us to keep it closed. A perfect example is our use of iTunes U. This is an environment that begs to be open so anyone can come in and subscribe to a course podcast and learn. Our faculty produced over 2300 course podcasts last Spring, but there are exactly 12 of them that are open to people outside of a given class. That is no different than our LMS universe.
I agree that content is infrastructure, but there is a philosophical component that goes along with this “ that learning designers and faculty alike must embrace the notion of openness in their design. I think we are on the verge of getting to a more open culture as it relates to content . . . a place where learning designers and faculty are trying to understand how to use new spaces to reinvent the delivery of content. I saw this about 10 years ago “ as people were just climbing the Internet mindset. Will it lead to an environment that promotes the use of emerging spaces in the delivery of University content? I hope so. We just aren't there yet, but given the right context it can become the norm.
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