George Siemens has announced on his blog, elearnspace, the Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning. This handbook was a joint collaboration between Siemans and Peter Tittenberger (Director of the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba). The handbook is licensed CC-BY-NC. From the handbook:
The aim of education to “arm every single person for the vital combat for lucidity”3 appears more difficult in a world of hyper-fragmentation, reflected in the development of the Internet and in the breakdown of traditional information structures such as newspapers, journals, and books.
How is education to fulfill its societal role of clarifying confusion when tools of control over information creation and dissemination rest in the hands of learners4, contributing to the growing complexity and confusion of information abundance?
We now differently relate to information. The roles of experts (educators) and novices (learners) have been altered substantially. What once involved mediators and experts (journals, books, encyclopaedias) can now be handled informally through the aggregated actions of many (Wikipedia, blogs, ebooks).
