A lesson from edtech’s early history (Weller, 2020) with immediate relevance today is a recurring failure across edtech’s evolution that corporations perpetuate: treating knowledge as a commodity to be shipped rather than an experience to be cultivated.
In 2000, the industry chased “Learning Objects”—modular content bricks designed for plug-and-play delivery (Weller, 2020, Chapter 7). But the decontextualization paradox set in: stripping away localized context to make content universally reusable renders content generic and pedagogically weak. By 2012, xMOOCs repeated this error at scale, treating education as a one-way delivery system for video assets (Weller, 2020, Chapter 19) .
To be clear, I am not against the “Lego bricks” approach or delivering content at scale; however, it requires intentional instructional design that aligns with how humans actually learn (Weller, 2020, p. 51). A simple metaphor illustrates this—learning is like a book club.
- The Reusable Content (Weller, 2020, Chapter 7) is the book itself—foundational, efficient to share, and unnecessary to rewrite from scratch.
- The Personal Learning Environment (Weller, 2020, Chapter 18) is your personal reading process—the decentralized, self-curated space where you annotate margins, take notes in your own tools, and process ideas on your own terms.
- Connectivism (Weller, 2020, Chapter 17) is the book club gathering—the shared physical, virtual, or mental space (what Nonaka & Konno, 1998, defined as Ba) where trust, dialogue, and collective sense-making transform static text into meaningful knowledge.
Collaborative sense-making and shared dialogue in a book club setting. (Photo: Getty Images / iStock)xMOOCs failed because they mistook building a digital library for running the club. Platforms like Coursera stall at the lowest levels of cognitive processing (Krathwohl, 2002)—relying on passive video watching and multiple-choice quizzes that test basic recall rather than higher-order synthesis or creation.
While Weller’s historical analysis proves that learning requires agency and social connection, current corporate practices directly contradict this lesson as learning is relegated to a “side-of-the-desk” activity. Organizations delude themselves that enterprise e-learning subscriptions equal capability building without providing relational dialogue or protected space for deep practice. Low return on investment is the predictable outcome.
Smart content reuse and digital delivery are essential for distributed workforces. But modern learning environments must intentionally cultivate personal reflection and shared dialogue—where real learning actually occurs.
References
- Krathwohl, D. R. (2002). A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy: An Overview. Theory Into Practice, 41(4), 212–218. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2
- Nonaka, I., & Konno, N. (1998). The concept of “Ba”: Building a foundation for knowledge creation. California Management Review, 40(3), 40–54. https://doi.org/10.2307/41165942
- Weller, M. (2020). 25 years of ed tech. AU Press. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993050.01
Hi Zubedia,
I really like your analogy of learning being like a book club; it captures perfectly how I view learning as a collaborative process. It is important to view knowledge through each others points of view and context in order to further our collective understanding; I frequently get challenged or questioned by students with different view points on topics and find that is where most learning takes place. Like yourself I am discouraged by the commodification of learning that Weller (2020) discusses, while it is helpful to have a deluge of resources and systems available I firmly believe the off the side of the desk approach without community or reflection does a disservice to learners and educators.
Hi Callan. Thank you so much for this comment! I love your point about student questions triggering the most meaningful learning—it really highlights how essential active, relational dialogue is to true understanding. The “off the side of the desk” approach might scale content, but as you noted, without community and reflection, we lose the very essence of what makes education transformative.
Hi Zubeida,
I really enjoyed your book club analogy, and like Callan, I think splitting learning into reusable content, PLE, and connectivism is astute and it rings true to my own pedagogical preferences too. It got me thinking about my own book club, where each month a different member picks the book, hosts the gathering, and sometimes builds tailored food or reflection activities around that book’s themes. Watching people react to a book *you* chose, in a space *you* built, is genuinely one of the most intersting parts of the whole experience, maybe more than the reading itself.
What strikes me is *why* that works: rotating who curates and hosts spreads that responsibility across the group instead of leaving it with one permanent facilitator. That’s essentially Cormier’s rhizomatic learning (Weller, 2020, Chapter 17): no fixed centre, just members taking turns steering. And I think it’s the same question underneath Weller’s point that higher ed has a duty to build misinformation literacy (Weller, 2020, Chapter 16), and his “pedagogy of abundance” (Weller, 2020, Chapter 17), now amplified by AI. If an instructor (and AI) pre-filters everything for students, are we actually helping, or just outsourcing the discernment work they need to build themselves? Weller asks almost exactly this in his PLE chapter, wondering whether auto-suggesting OER to struggling students short-circuits the very “learning to learn” skills we want them to develop (Weller, 2020, Chapter 18).
Another question is *when* should we use rhizomatic learning. Maybe aspects of the “rotating host” are worth adding to your analogy, but it might depend on where the self-directed/learner-overhead balance should sit. I guess Learning Outcomes are the best test of that.
Hi Claire. Thank you for such a rich expansion of the book club analogy! The “rotating host” model captures the essence of Cormier’s rhizomatic learning so well—decentralizing authority and making curation a shared, relational responsibility.
Your points on Weller’s (2020) chapters regarding the “pedagogy of abundance” and AI auto-suggestions really hit on a crucial tension. There is a real risk that if an algorithm pre-digests, filters, and serves up content, students lose the constructive friction needed to build critical evaluation skills.
However, whether that “short-circuiting” actually happens comes down to good instructional design. If an assignment stops at finding or summarizing content, the tool does the heavy lifting. But if we shift the task to metacognition—asking students “Why did you pick this source versus that one?”—we restore the discernment muscle. The learning shifts from the act of finding information to the active defense and justification of choices made along the way.
I apply this exact approach when interviewing job candidates. Because our team rewrites extensive content and our organization actively encourages using AI, I ask applicants to submit a writing sample they’ve revised for effectiveness. If they used AI, I ask them to share their exact prompts and explain why they chose them. This reveals how they leverage the tool and where they exercise their own human agency. Ultimately, I care less about whether the initial draft came from a person or a machine—what matters is that the final piece meets our quality standards and that the candidate can articulate the intentional choices that got it there.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this.