You place a poster on a wall to communicate. Maybe you are promoting an event, sending an important message, or sharing something special. Hanging a poster is easy. Find some drawing pins (maybe from the poster next door), strike the edges with a stapler or paste it on some sticky tack. Putting them up is easy, but chances are you won’t manage, revise or remove them.
Like me, you might have walked along city streets, or past village noticeboards bearing old and long since irrelevant messages. Nobody stops to look, and nobody really cares that the space might be wasted – but it is wasted space.
You might be doing the same in a document management system, or in a virtual learning environment. Through content you promote an event or activity, you send an important message, or you share something meaningful. Posting content is as easy as hanging a poster; add it to a calendar or event list, post or attach it to a forum post, or carefully place it in one or more repositories.
If you are familiar with, and are often required to make use of document management or learning management systems regularly, you will understand the importance of maintaining fresh content. You likely just breeze past pages of content in your VLE that have long since become irrelevant, or has been superseded but not updated. You might put much effort into locating content buried deep within complex hierarchical document libraries.
Do you have old content hanging on the walls of your learning platforms and document management systems? How often is the content you reach within these organizational content management systems still current and meaningful? I’m guessing not as often as you might like.