Dangerous Assumptions
Wayne Hodgins,
Off Course-On Target,
May 25, 2007
The point of Wayne Hodgins's post (which as a happy side-effect introduces Erik Duval's blog (Erik, who is based at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, is president of the ARIADNE Foundation, technical editor for the (IEEE) standard on Learning Object Metadata, and coordinator of the work on learning objects, metadata and interoperability within the ProLearn Network of Excellence)) is this: "for the foreseeable future, I hope that we remain very aware of just how limited online searching is and that we continue to check our assumptions that 'everyone and everything is available online, otherwise they don't exist.'" I don't think anyone actually makes that assumption - the assertion that "if you're not online, you don't exist" is metaphorical. But also, there's a credibility issue. If you aren't online, how credible are you? If, especially, your domain is, say, online learning, and you're not online, how credible are you. Yes, as Hodgins says, a great deal of the world's information is not online. But that information - that is not instantly and freely available online - is increasingly and increasingly irrelevant. Because it is not credible.
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