INST 7150

Big ramble....
In K-12, I would make the assertion that we do more repurposing than reusing. (Especially those of us who teach different grade levels every year.) Each year brings new standards, new content, new students, thus we have to tweak what we have to fit the learning needs of our students and all those wonderful new requirements. Our "catalogs" would be our files - digital or otherwise - to which we add or subtract new items, and change what we have to meet the needs of our students for that year. Not every teacher does that, as I taught next door to one who was a master at "reuse". She had a file folder for each school day, and inside the folder was every ditto for the day. Each year was the same for each group of kids. They did the same dittos, they covered the same topics, they read the same books, they did the same art projects. And the following year, when I got them, there were usually a ton of gaps I had to fill in for each kid, because most of what they had done the previous year had been set in place 10 years prior, therefore very little of what they did had any meaning to them. It might have had meaning to that first class 10 years ago, but now - kids are different, instructional strategies are different, standards are different - you can't continue to reuse something just because you've always used it when it no longer has meaning. (And if tradition has lost meaning - I would hesitate to keep that too....)

Automating or automated systems - considering the type of content assessed on the standardized tests, automated systems would probably prep my students very well - memorize facts, practice skill-based content, pick from multiple choice question - no real thinking involved. If I want them to actually think - i.e. compare and contrast and make a decision about something, synthesize or apply the knowledge they've gained, then an automated system is going to be the last thing I want. (But my stupidintendent, who wants to eliminate teachers from the district with his purchase of Plato and just having to hire "instructional aides" at a cheaper salary than a teacher - thinks automated systems are the way to go!)