When I first entered the web development scene several months ago, everywhere I turned I read that, “Content is King.” This may well be true because, after all, the content is your message – it’s what you are sharing with the world. But these days, it seems all about delivery – about CONTEXT. Freedom of context – of the people, by the people, for the people. If Content is King then Context is like a democratic government allowing various avenues of freedom (without encroaching on someone else’s freedoms of course).
Today at the Wharton Developer’s Meeting, Dave Siedell brought up the point that there are so many third party tools these days for developer’s to choose from that they can essentially spend more time perfecting content because contextual presentations are readily available as embeddable widgets. This leaves developers with more freedom to cater to the audience and to pull users in with creative delivery mechanisms.
I think of what these widgets can do for developers as a parallel for what all of the new learning techniques can do for professors as well. Professors can communicate the same message in a variety of different ways that will work well for a variety of different learners. Are we in a contextual revolution? Choose your medium wisely!
I have mixed feelings about freedom and too many choices. Some days I am overwhelmed and frustrated, viewing the abundance of choices as more mental clutter in my life. Other days I am thrilled that I am growing up in a world where I can choose to communicate my message through whatever means suits my personality and strengths. I guess it comes back to the importance of really knowing what you want in today’s society. Maybe we need to train people to “know thyself” better and also to be able to adequately and perhaps quickly go through cost/benefit analyses.
Sometimes I just don’t know what I want because maybe the technology hasn’t been invented yet, or maybe it has but it just hasn’t penetrated the market yet. Maybe I should take it upon myself to find some good resources to post on here for making decent choices in a choice-saturated society. It would also be good to do some sort of write up on context (both in learning and in developing). So that will be my blogging tasks for next week. Stay tuned for more information!