12.30.05
The Blended Learning Book
I have been reading a book entitled The Blended Learning Book: Best Practices, Proven Methodologies, and Lessons Learned, by Josh Bersin. This book is a great handbook on blended learning. While it is written primarily for the private sector (business training is the emphasis), many of the ideas and research it contains are applicable to about any educational setting.
One of the interesting concepts that is discussed in the book is the idea of content durability, i.e. the idea that content of certain types can expire. One of the problems with content that is developed using some of our current paradigms (RSS, blogs, etc.) is that the content is not easily managed for validity and currency. This is an essential aspect when managing knowledge (the kind of content that is considered an asset in most businesses). Since the book is narrowly targeted at business and corporate training, it is, at times, difficult to transfer some of the ideas to public sector education. That said, the concepts presented are timely and constitute an excellent introduction to the concepts of blended learning.
