Two considerations:

Topic/ content
I work across Engineering, Computing, Education, Environmental Management, and it is possible in all these fields to define a series of topics, each one in 50/100 words, and for each topic to specify an activity: design, construct, research, compare, change, apply, calculate, plan, analyse, etc, or combinations of these.

Each activity requires access to content. But here you can offer a number of choices – self-managed choices:

0. The learner might already know enough to complete the activity, or know where to find it, so they dont need to access any content in the course – on the contrary, you might get them to contribute their content TO the course.

1. The learner might need to check the basic content that you, as course designer, regard as relevant to the activity – which they can decide to explore and check to see that they are on the right track.

2. The learner might need much more than the basic content, either at a more elementary level or, if they are determined to excel, at a more advanced level.

Layered Self-managed Resources
The way this is operationalised is to provide layered content at three or four levels: basic, more detailed, more elementary, more advanced, and make it all available for the learner to link to, and use. Only the most basic content is ‘up front’ in the text, or described and linked to in the main text.

Students have to decide how much content they need, and at what level, for each activity. This forces them to self-manage their resource requirements for each activity, and within a single, navigable web-page structure, they do it very largely without instruction.

The interesting thing for me is that what emerges from the use of this approach for designing ‘learning objects’ (topic + activity + layered resources) is a series of web-pages each of which is aimed, at first glance, at an above average student – i.e. someone who may or may not need the content resources that have been provided, but certainly will not need all of them.

The average or struggling student, as well as the student who really wants to excel, will need to explore the content in more depth, and ‘drill down’/out to further layers.

There is a published article on this approach: “Flexible Learning for Engineering” in: Innovations and Research in Engineering Education special edition, Fall, 2007, but its an expensive publication. I can send you a copy of the article if you are interested.

I’m a little confused on this though:

“Focus serialisation on what the ‘community’ / cohort will DO, not what they CONSUME – sorry to put it so starkly, but I am not sure there is that much ‘grey’ left in this issue.”

Serialization by nature draws from static content. That content may have expository elements, but also imperative elements (“after reading this — find a problem in your town and blog about it”). So maybe we’re just defining things differently.

But I’m not sure, if we follow the standard content+interaction+assessment view of things that you can serialize interaction — that would imply interaction was a set store of something that could be cut into chunks, when in fact it is the emergent element of the class…within content there are cues for the interaction and activities, these are what get serialized.

But perhaps I am misunderstanding you.

1. Cohort sounds too formal and too constrained, but what’s in a name? My personal choice is Community of Inquiry.

2. Much more fundamental though: In designing “digital ecologies”/ “virtual adaptive networks” for learning, the crucial shift is to move completely away from content-driven events to activity-driven events.

This gets us to the starting blocks for connectivist / inquiry-based / problem-based / activity-based learning /networked / CoP or workshop -based learning. Pick a term and an approach to suit your needs, but this is the threshold for learning now, surely?

So the serialisation mechanism is often required – it is a key driver for community, and learning is social and contextual, in many ways, no?

But …
Focus serialisation on what the ‘community’ / cohort will DO, not what they CONSUME – sorry to put it so starkly, but I am not sure there is that much ‘grey’ left in this issue.