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The use of the word content in education has risen rapidly over the last few years not least with the introduction of “curriculum online” and also learning platforms – I feel there are a number of issues about this. What the term actually means may be the first issue though minor and more to the point resolvable. However related to the curriculum online “thing” is the suggestion that we may be able to get to a point where we have “sufficient” content or that with the “right” software environment, most content problems could be solved in a cheap and efficient manner. I do not subscribe to these views, not only because we limit developments enormously if we get too concerned with “cheap and efficient” anything but for these reasons :

· Firstly the “quantity” of “content” is not something that can be usefully measured or volume targeted

· Secondly content is not an ICT or technology issue per se;

· Thirdly, if it is a characteristic of the content itself that matters, then it should be the quality rather than quantity. Ultimately, however its intelligent use is the critical factor; thus demanding that teachers and pupils know how to use it and confirming that the only correct focuses remain teaching, learning, and fundamentally thinking.

· Finally content is not something which should be viewed as static; there is increasingly scope to debate (in a Web 2 world) that content is dynamic and should reflect ongoing contribution from a wider publishing readership rather than simply being a supply of information to a passive recipient readership (which keeps us locked in the old transmission model of teaching/learning).

It is this last point that actually explains the previous ones and which enables the content to have any value or purpose; namely, that it stimulates and drives working at the higher and NOT just the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy and by so doing enables society to progress rather than stagnate or regress. So against a culture of trying to drown us in “content” could it be that the historical difficulties with spending eLCs actually reflects a discerning teacher force?