If you want to put anything new in a full bucket, you have to dump everything into a bigger bucket, or remove things from the bucket to make room for a the new. From a constructivist viewpoint, this is bad because you need to keep the old stuff around to make connections with the new stuff. Buckets are a good analogy for a better way to learn than a box, but since buckets are made with a fixed capacity, they aren’t what we should ultimately want. We ultimately should want something that has no limits, and therefore ready to for any ideas for anyone out there.

@Chris – I was talking with Harriet – we decided that bucket is a bad analogy for New Vision. It pretty good for Google Wave. The thought is that the bucket is going to only have a finite number of things you can put in it. But at least you can put what you want in there. And that is true of Google Wave. But, as an instructor, you are still going to be limited by the plug-ins you have access to. Even if is is installed on your school server, you are still going to be limited by how it is customized from the top down. If you don’t like how it is set-up, you are still going to have to go EduPunk.

The goal with New Vision is to create a light weight system that is like handing a piece of play dough to instructors and saying: “here – stick whatever you want to this. No limits set from the top.”

Ultimately – I’m not sure if the platform that you build the New Vision on would matter. I could even see there being a Google Wave version, a Moodle version, WordPress plug-ins, etc. In fact, we’ll probably build New Vision based on Moodle before Wave is even released.

Google also has a 50/50 track record with delivering on hype. Sometimes, they just hype stuff too early before discovering they can’t safely do what they want. We can’t bank on anything in that video becoming reality – until it does. I’d rather LMS be a new way to think of the LMS in general – but not tied to the way one tool does things.

Also – university IT departmetns do get in turf wars over tech. What if they block Wave on campus, but allow Wimba? Wouldn’t we want the Wimba users to still be able to use the New Vision?

OR…

One segment of the video I didn’t include in my post – but may go back and do now – demonstrated any organization/individual with the skillset can develop their own Wave interface; you don’t have to use the Google Developed UI. They demonstrated a simple, text only Unix, commandline type interface.

Here’s the cool thing then… Wave is a platform on which you could build what you’ve talked about, and enabled within that is all the collaboration and composition tools that Wave makes possible.

-cmd

-cmd