In response to my posting http://patrickdunn.squarespace.com/occasional-rants/2006/12/14/all-e-learning-should-be-entirely-templated.html , Jay Cross made a typically pithy comment:

"This is all very logical but don't you overlook the fact that increasingly, knowledge is co-created rather than transferred?"

This set me scratching my head. The only thing I’d disagree with is Jay’s use of the word “increasingly”; my assumption has been that knowledge has always been most effectively co-created, it’s just that networks are helping us recognize this. Indeed, I battle with my clients on a daily basis against simplistic notions of knowledge being “transferred”. The thought that I might be advocating some kind of e-learning 0.5, broadcast, course-based agenda makes my skin crawl (just a bit).

If you look through the four main principles I outline, it’s not implied anywhere that they only work with old-style “courses”, using “broadcast” models, studied passively by lone individuals. I’ve used each of the four principles just as effectively with kids wandering around city centres in packs using hand-helds as with adults grappling with the principles of social learning as applied in Second Life.

As for Stephen Downes’ typically brilliant link to my posting, I was of course deeply humbled (once I’d stopped giggling). One thing though, Stephen. The UK e-learning industry (at least the bit that's concerned with producing “stuff” for adult learners in large organisations) is sorely in need of more sophisticated approaches to re-use. You’d pull your magnificent hair out if you saw what goes on. While I completely agree that nothing I wrote was particularly ground-breaking, there’s a whole industry out there that seems to be making no real progress towards the kinds of approaches you’ve been advocating for a long time. This is particularly sad given the vibrant, creative approaches being taken by the other design disciplines I’ve been looking at. Repetition, even of old ideas, helps learning, as we know.