I spent two and a half days this week at OpenEd '09, an amazing conference organized by UBC's Brian Lamb and his amazing colleagues.

One of the most compelling ideas coming out of this community is a radically learner-centric approach, in which individual learners own their own blogs as platforms for their own experience, reflection, and expresion. In the Reverend Jim Groom's words, "a domain of one's own" riding on the "syndication bus" of cheap RSS. What a "course" potentially becomes, then, is an aggregation of learners who are oriented to the same subject (at the same time): aggregation of student voices rather than the aggregation of content into a "course"

This re-orientation of the "axes" of learning is something of a copernican shift. Jim Groom's session on The Design of Openess lays this out fully; you can watch the video of his talk at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1972917

On Thursday I presented on the wiki vision that has been emerging through years of experimentation with Thinkubator. My point was that wiki's shared, generative space results in a shared culture, a community of inquiry with an emergent ethic. But I had to acknowledge my current discomfort that my wiki approach completely ignores the "syndication bus" and its tantalizing implications. Here I am, championing an all-inclusive system that requires students to write where I tell them to write, instead of being entirely 'open.'

But in a brief discussion after my talk with Catherine Paul from UBC OLT, we got to a better distillation of the importance of wiki. It is that such a system puts learners/writers in a position of co-stewardship of the shared space in between.

An aggregation of individual feeds is an aggregation of individual voices. Each writer is in a position of either writing their own post or commenting on someone else's, but never really has the opportunity to be in between, in a space owned and created by the collective—nor to directly appreciate their responsibility for that shared space.

The important fact of blogging is the larger blogosphere; this has been clear for a long time. The "syndication bus" approach absolutely recognizes this, and the "90 degree rotation" in perspective (that's an Alan Kay-ism) that Jim's point about "axes" is the realization of this for education. It is one of the most powerful ideas I've heard in years.

But there's more to education and learning than the aggregation of voices, just as there is more to society than "individual men and women, and families."

The shared generative space that wiki provides, and the shared culture and shared ethic that is achieved in a working wiki community speaks to this other thing.

I think the syndication bus is an absolutely critical new idea, and my task in the months to come is definitely to figure out how to reconcile it with the wiki way.