It’s easy to get so caught up in day-to-day routines as to overlook gradual changes in fundamentals. When I squint to see the big picture of internet culture, the thinking of three people helps me undertand what’s going on. Internet Culture and the Evolution of Learning (pdf, html) explores how David Wineberger, Tim O’Reilly, and Kevin Kelly see the world and the resultant impact on how and what adults learn.
The Cluetrain Manifesto is the most revolutionary business book of the late twentieth century. The clue is that the internet enables person-to-person conversation, and everyone is the wiser for it. The entire book and a bit of its history are available for free at cluetrain.com.
Kevin Kelly is the pied piper of the new economy. As the founding editor of Wired magazine, author of Out of Control and New Rules for the New Economy, and cohort of Steward Brand, Kelly’s technophilic philosophy has become the new business gospel.
Tim O’Reilly publishes books about the net and open source software, but he’s more than a publisher. Tim’s goal is “to become the information provider of choice to the people who are shaping the future of our planet, and to enable change by capturing and transmitting the knowledge of innovators and innovative communities.” Tim and his colleagues coined the term Web 2.0. repositioned free software as Open Software, and kick-started participation on the web with “Internet in a Box” software.
The internet stew I’ve just cooked up is made of perpetual beta, the long tail, user-centered development, loose coupling, intangibles, connections, push the edges, power to peers, honesty, authenticity, and transparency.
In the paper, I take an initial stab at explaining how each of these ingredients impacts learning.
Please add your thoughts as a comment.
Transparency is your friend.
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I wrote a Masters paper on Agile Instructional Design. Do you think what I am saying here warrents further research? http://www.rawsthorne.org/bit/docs/RawsthorneAIDFinal.pdf
Peter, in a word, yes.
You have a beginning argument but no answer to “So what?”
Also, your flowchart borrows a little too heavily from the software model. I would want to see many little tests of “Did they get it?” This is the essence of agility. Short feedback cycles, not do an entire curriculum and re-assess.
The Agility people would have a problem calling what they do Extreme Programming.
All the sense you’re talking aside – these are the coolest graphics. So, transparency being your friend and all – please share how you achieved the effects…
Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control had the most impact on my view of learning of the three authors you mentioned. His vivid examples of biological and ecological dynamics convinced me to view learning as organic, evolutionary and emergent. His story — of the robots that only worked once the “big brain” model was abandoned — was an early metaphor for my giving control to the learners, utilizing their “distributed intelligence” and abandoning the “command and control” pedagogy for an “out of control” model. His presentation of co-evolution, emergent cooperation and mutualisms gave me the idea to present myself as someone who is learning, not teaching. It then made sense that students could pursue “imitation learning” from all I was learning, instead of a forcing themselves into a mechanistic picture of my transferring skills or transmitting knowledge. This fulfilled the truism that “the best way to learn something is to teach it”. It also set me up to “be a learning organization” and realize all the benefits of learning from my customers, setbacks and successes. His descriptions of succession systems, continual dress rehearsals and poised instability launched my “compost theory of learning” which I’ve added to my blog today.
I’m developing an assessment engine that can be embedded in any content, game or activity. It would generate a ’score’ for any cognitive activity, like say a percentile ranking on verbal memory (vocabulary), symbolic, figural processing, etc. So, one could get a variety of scores. The implications of thisfor evaluating and learning content are huge!
Please contact me for further information. I am in need of help to get this thing going as well!
Thx
In answer to Karyn’s query about graphics, these were simple. I use PowerPoint as a canvas for putting together a collage like the books at the beginning. I used PaintShopPro, a cheap knockoff of Photoshop, to mess with the venn diagram.