I had breakfast with Lou Rosenfeld today to tell him about an exciting project I have started with Andy Seidl of Myst Technologies. Using Andy's blog application server we are developing a new collaborative learning application.
Learning has always been a process distributed in time and space. If there are physical or virtual sessions where learners gather together, they only last a finite amount of time, and regardless, learners scatter between sessions. Thus, the revision, thinking, and other processes that lead to learning take place away from others. The question facing learning organizations is whether and how to support these distributed activities.
Andy's and my effort is predicated on the assumption that we can use the underlying semantics of learners' blog postings to infer where they are in their learning process. Given a lot of past work in learning, that's a pretty safe bet. The big question is how easy it will be to extract semantics from the content.
I chose to work with Andy on this project because his underlying semantic representation of blog content is superior. The ability to easily analyze and aggregate content will be the magic sauce in this effort. I've been talking with Lou and others about some of the things we might look at. Watch this space for updates over the coming few weeks. It's a pretty exciting project.
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