So what's a lecture anyhow?

Interested by this article at the New York Times - 'At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard'. Which means, I guess, the bin.
The negative attitude - of both experts and learners - to 'lectures' (or indeed anything that looks and feels like formal learning) is one of the parameters we have to deal with at CoJo. It's true, that even the most formal looking sessions (which, though formal, stop a long way short of what I recognise by the word 'lecture') tend win learners over in the end ... all the same, the idea of something 'formal' is an initial barrier. And while a college with full-time students might just about get away with it (but shouldn't), the last thing we can afford to offer time-poor, stressed, in-career potential learners is something that they think will mean a lot of listening.
MIT's change to "smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning" for its introduction isn't exactly an educational revolution nor is the insight that "most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning." But it's interesting that even within a context where you might expect a formal approach ... it's now judged less effective than the alternative.

Wholly trinity

When we talk about making 'the CoJo website' public, it's slightly misleading - mostly because it won't be a single site.
We'll be using Movable Type as our content production and management system. It'll be used to produce both blogs (though we won't call them that ... I know, I know) and stuff that is recognisbly online learning. Alongside that content, though, we'll use third party networking tools.
For the learner, it will feel to the user like a single site ... but it'll be three 'entities' each of which will have fuzzy edges.
Why are we doing it this way?
Well partly because we're starting from where we are and with the ambition that we have ... and somehow we have to weave the two together. Actually, this is more opportunity than challenge. A few years ago, we'd have built a couple of dozen interactive 'howto' modules in Flash with a 'how have you done?' test at the end and bingo. Everybody happy. No evidence, of course, that any of the learning would have made the slightest difference to anyone ... but learners would have done it, a box would have a tick in it etc etc. Now we know different - we know more about how career journalists learn and how they want to learn; we know the value of informal learning and networking. Ideally, we'd start from there - using powerful informal learning tools. But that's not how organisations work. For understandable reasons, organisations - especially publicly accountable ones - like tangible stuff, auditable stuff, stuff that shows compliance.
So, the answer we've come up with is a trinitarian one which offers learners different routes to that learning but which, crucially, allows shared informal learning from blogs and networking to develop more built learning. A bit like this:

The other important feature of our learning offer - which is there in the graphic - is that for the most part, the way into that learning is via some kind of awareness/alert. 'This is an issue' or 'this is a dilemma' or 'this is difficult' etc. We'll then pack around that deepening layers of reference ... from quick tips, advice and how-tos through interactive walk-throughs and top-level briefings to deep reference ... to which we will link out, naturally.