Rip, Mix, and Learn - a new way of learning

For those who are reading my blog who attended the IT Institute with me, this is old news. For others, there is a lot of chatter on the Internet now about RML: Rip, Mix, and Learn. The basic idea is that with the Internet, a good model for learning is to rip stuff that's out there (or in other words, grab it, collect, convert it so you have it, whatever it is), mix it (which means personalize it, remix it, change it so it has your spin), and then learn from the process. It's a way of synthesizing material from many sources by mixing them into one product. We've done this for a long time. Traditional English papers often meant collecting quotes from others and remixing them so it made sense to you. Now with modern technologies we can do this in many new ways and do it much easier.

The implications, as I see them, for education are that students don't need to be receivers of knowledge, or dumpsters where teachers do some information dumping. Instead, they can be creators of new knowledge, remixed from old information they glean from the Internet. They can Rip, Mix, and Learn words, audio, video, and many other things and learn through the creation of the new products.

Will Richardson refers to a presentation on this topic by Alan Levine about this topic, and then Will goes on to say how blogging and other new technologies can enable RML by our students:

" Today, Alan writes about RML with RSS as he's building combined feeds with Blogdigger. The "rip" is to take feeds from a number of different sources, "mix" them into one feed, and "learn" from the results. The easy example for students is to create a number of search feeds for the same terms from various sources (Bloglines, Feedster, Google News etc.) and then stick them all together at Blogdigger.

What I think has even more potential at some point is the mixing on all the content feeds that a particular student might have to create a virtual portfolio feed. For instance, as a teacher using all of these tools in the classroom, I would love one feed that watches what my student posts in her Weblog (either just in my class or in all of her classes,) what she saves to Furl, the pictures that she takes to supplement her work at Flickr, the e-mails she receives to her rss-able Bloglines e-mail account, and her contributions to the class wiki. I wouldn't mind that as a parent either. Anyway, it's cool to think about the possibilities. Still just a wacky vision in a few wacky brains, but you never know..."

I don't know if I would take it as far as Will (can you imagine trying to manage all of those different feeds from all of you students?), but I agree with him in previous posts that blogging is a form of RML. Maybe that's why I love to do it!