Re: The sweet spot in education

Martin Weller provides a screencast of a presentation he made recently at the JISC Emerge conference, where he spoke about ‘finding the sweet spot between web 2 and education.’ In introducing the screencast, Martin says:

My basic argument is that new tools encourage this overlap between areas we used to keep distinct, for instance home and work,personal and professional, individual and institution. A lot of people see this as a ‘bad thing’, but I think it has enormous potential also.

Martin and others at the Open University are right out there working the edges of the educational future, and his screencast nicely illustrates some of the issues with which they’re grappling. Highly recommended.

Below is the comment that I left on Martin’s post:

You folks at OU are certainly into some impressive things. And the direction represented by the sweet spot seems right on target. My only concern is whether it can be accomplished within an existing institution. Maybe it can be done at OU. It’s well worth trying. Do you have a sense of how hitting the sweet spot would work for other institutions? Is it a model with enough general persuasiveness and appeal that it could form the basis of institutional change in higher education? Or does hitting the sweet spot require a entrepreneurial foundation outside of existing educational institutions?