The Parsimony of the Explicit
David Weinberger,
Darwin Online,
Jan 28, 2002
I think there's something important happening in this article but I'm not quite sure I can put a finger on it. Elearningpost summarized it as follows: "David Weinberger: Most Web designers try to control the users? experience. Some try to shape it. And a precious few try to become that experience." That's not bad, but it misses the fact that most of the article is a response against a view proposed by the W3C's Charles Munat to the effect that, "a web site is data, relationships among data, and transformations that may be applied to that data. These are all abstract. For us to interact with a web site, the data/relationships/transformations must become concrete. In an ideal world, the user would have complete control over how this process of um, reification, for want of a better word, occurs." Weinberger's view. The response is, essentially, that if you separate the content from the manner in which the content is presented - that is, if you separate the medium from the message - something important is lost. Now here's the important part: I think that both Weinberger and Munat is correct. The reader must create the relationships and the presentation, and yet, these must also be created by the deisgner. How how how? Solve this, and you've solved the fundamental problem of learner centered learning.
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