Teaching and Learning is one of those realms where my interests overlap with others, but I'm not sure if it's a good candidate for a group effort to do something constructive.

Here's what I think, and I'd be delighted to see others augment/amend it:

Education is something you do to yourself.

I've been pursuing that notion for quite a while, and now I'm finding a number of other toilers in that vineyard, most notably Stephen Downes and George Siemens. Is it co-incidence that both are Canadian, and that other Canadians are bigtime actors in this arena (see EdTech Posse on Glu)? I think not... The general rubric seems to be e-Learning, and most of the players are IT people, not profs (and not librarians --though there are some exceptions). Other people I think of as having closely related interests: Gardner Campbell, Brian Lamb, Alan Levine ...all of whom know each other, I think.

(Insert crosslinks here to a couple of recent posts from oook blog, for Stephen Downes outtakes which seem especially redolent: links to Metaversity quotes and on being Radical)

So Education: you do it to yourself, and each learner is responsible for his/her own wetware... and what learners chiefly need (and generally don't realize they can have) are effective management tools for their own processes of learning. Such tools exist (this is obviously one of them) but learners have to string them together for themselves, and have to [be empowered to] feel that they are in control. That model of learning doesn't fit very comfortably into conventional educational institutions, or the ways of thinking of most professors.

A central concept that I was entangled with for a couple of years is The Commons, a term that has unfortunately been stretched to cover too many disparate needs. This morning I happened upon The Future of Digital Commons (a 2-hour Forum at MIT with presentations by Nancy Kranich, Ann Wolpert and Steven Pinker, September 2005): I watched the first part of it, and I'm amazed at the quality... which makes me very interested to sample other MIT World presentations. And it's this sort of 'learning object', along with podcasts and other means to distribute content and subtlety, that have the potential to re-cast the whole game of teaching-and-learning, and to put the learner in control of the experience, and the process.

I begin to see how easily one (or maybe a collective of several) might create and keep alive a wikitext for a course, or for some non-traditional form of Learning activity. It's somehow a lot more gratifying than a suite of Web1.0 static pages, precisely because it can grow rhizomatically. In fact I'm beginning to like it a lot...