Good ideas in education have a always had way of 'catching on', but in this era of social media, some go viral. What starts out as a creative innovation that solves one school's or one person's problem is picked up by a few others. They tell 2 friends and they tell 2 more and so on and so on until  teachers everywhere are trying to reproduce this innovation in their classrooms and what was innovative becomes the norm.  'Same-old, same-old' is replaced by 'same-new, same-new'. 

It's not that the innovation was a bad one. It's that  giving it the tag of 'cure-all', mass producing it, and then professionally developing everyone in to go about it (sort of), means the original vision becomes so diluted, the very thing that made it innovative in the first place is lost. It's no longer a creative response but has morphed into an expected norm. The more we chase formulaic fixes to the problems of teaching and learning the less responsive we become to leaner's needs.

Belshaw's article on the commoditization of learning makes a good point. He says embracing new techniques (in this case ‘flipped classroom’) can divert us from the important work of  "challenging core assumptions about how we can and should be educating young people." When one teacher's innovation turns into an educational movement, once again some students' needs will be met, but others will lose out.

Perhaps that's why really big MOOC's have the potential to be different. They become like massive think tanks -- but with each individual bubbling up his/her own unique caldron of unique responses to unique conditions. Double, double, toil, and trouble ... aggregate, remix, repurpose, feed forward... Perhaps this kind of learning can keep us out of the stew pot.