The more I explore the educational uses of the web – both potential and existing – the more I’m struck by the diversity of the ecosystem. There are lots of educators doing lots of exciting, innovative things, and using the web as both the landscape for their activities, as well as a roadmap for documenting their experiences and findings.

I also notice recurring themes. The edublogosphere – if there is such a word – seems to be just as susceptible to memes and shared topics as those outside of education. For an example of this you need only look to the bustle of activity that surrounded the phrase “edupunk” some months ago. In an extremely short period of time, the word went from obscurity to a topic that was revered, mocked, supported, refuted, and gazed at with curiosity and puzzlement. The term reportedly even made it to Wikipedia in the first day and a half after its first usage.

From the standpoint of the individual, the barriers to entry and participation in what are nebulously referred to as Web 2.0, social media, new media, or social software are extraordinarily low. Free hosting services enable the creation of blogs and wikis in mere moments and facilitate outreach and collaboration on a scale and scope that was once either previously prohibitively expensive, required high levels of technical expertise, or both. The notion of personal space has gone virtual, and it’s being wholeheartedly embraced.

A byproduct of this is the complexification of information brought on by a culture of abundance. With minimal barriers to entry and technical requirements to contribute, virtually anyone can share their thoughts with the web – this creates an atmosphere rife with extraordinary amounts of information. So much so that trying to locate relevant subject matter can be on par with a thirsty individual trying to drink from a firehose. Most topics are covered by multiple sites; and the really popular topics are covered by dozens or more. This poses some interesting challenges for web users – educational or otherwise.

In the case of Siemens and Downes’ Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course, discussion, collaboration, debate and sharing of information is occurring across countless sites, portals, virtual environments, Elluminate sessions, and Twitter threads. In this ecosystem the individual is empowered tremendously through a culture of exceptional depth and diversity; yet in tandem to this is the ever present notion that you’re missing something important.

This notion is seen at the group level as well, and here it carries some interesting implications and challenges. For example in the case of collaborative project work a common approach is to create a brand new space at the onset, rather than build on the efforts of an existing community. While this may go a long way to establishing evidence of outcomes, in many regards it runs counter to notion of collaboration by fracturing discussions that may already be occurring elsewhere.

Take the SecondLife project I’m working on for example. Discussions are presently underway regarding the key outcomes the project will seek to address, and high on the list is the creation of a space to share and disseminate the findings of the study as well as establish a discursive, collaborative community for educators interested in exploring the educational uses of the virtual world. A practical idea perhaps, and yet sites already exist that do this. So the question arises whether it makes sense to create yet another site on the educational uses of SecondLife, or instead to contribute to existing sites elsewhere.

If one of the key outcomes of this project in particular, and others like it, is to further the field of education, empower learning in virtual worlds, inspire discussion and sharing of ideas across the sector, it stands to reason that establishing the most common ground and/or neutral territory within which to interact would make the most sense.

And yet with universities still more or less being walled gardens, in which prestige and reputation are the measured currency, the expectation is that projects need to be closely tied back to the institution of origin so as to set them apart from others. As a result branded websites that differentiate local projects from external ones are seen to be a desirable choice, even though they result in artificial silos that inhibit the flow of information and collaboration by creating a competitive us-and-them attitude instead of one of partnered exploration.

Everyone is calling for increased collaboration, it seems, so long as the collaboration occurs on their space and not elsewhere.

Thoughts?