Brandon Muramatsu

Philosophies for the Development of Learning Technologies

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][I started writing this post in April, and haven’t really had a chance to come back to it. So I figured I might as well clean it up and present it as is. –Brandon]

COSL Philosophies

At COSL we had a number of philosophies that guided our development of learning technologies.

  • Open is good. Open encompasses principles including sharing and transparency. We want our tools to be used, adopted, adapted and modified so they provide value. Open provides the best way we know to accomplish these goals.
  • Communities are important, but challenging to identify and support, and must be nurtured. This is a really bastardized summary of research on online communities, and should serve as a warning to any project thinking communities are a panacea that will save their project.
  • Education is “different”, but the tools and services we develop for this community should not be separate. History Experience has taught us, “If you build it, they mostly don’t come.”
  • Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use existing open web tools and services. Integrate and adapt them to your needs. 80% might be good enough. (This is the pareto principle that we use to say that even if an existing tool or service only provides 80% of the functionality you want that’s 80% you don’t have to develop yourself and the 20% might not be really important.)
  • Prototype tools and services to demonstrate what’s possible. Assume that someone may come along and do your idea better, faster, larger and be prepared to migrate to a “competing” solution. This may not make as much sense here, but I expand upon this idea in a recent post.
  • “Working code trumps all.” ’nuff said. (We’ve attributed this quote to the late Phillip Dodds of the Advance Distributed Learning Initiative and keyboard playing alien communicator from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.)
  • Education projects are rarely as well funded as startup companies, a corollary to above. Leverage what you can from the open Web, even if from a startup company. They may not be sustainable, but are you? And they’re almost definitely better funded and can innovate and deliver faster.
  • Interoperability and integration are good. Tools and services, content, and projects are not islands or walled gardens. Open up and provide for and assume interoperability and integration.
  • Simple is very good. Making it easy is also good.

Exploring Sustainability at OEIT

Some of the challenges we didn’t get a a chance to work on at COSL, but that I am exploring through my current job at OEIT are:

  • Long term sustainability of projects. Education projects rarely understand what long term sustainability means, nor how to achieve it.
  • Sunseting/ending projects and the implications for groups of participants. Education projects rarely end deliberately, they often suffer slow lingering deaths that are not useful for any involved.

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