Ken Carroll

I’m learning more and learning faster than would have been possible 5 years ago. The participative web (aka, web 2.0) makes this happen. The new-found capacity to participate through the web has put learning on steroids, and ushered in a new kind of empowerment of the individual. Let me see if I can explain my thinking and at the same time relate it to, er, Finnegan’s Wake.

Here’s the web in 2007 from a (ridiculously-condensed) learning perspective:

Google organizes teraybytes of information and presents it to us almost instantaneously, while a slew of new web tools assist us with managing and participating in learning.

Let’s take a look at one of those tools: RSS. With RSS I can narrow my focus to an area I want to learn about, track the key words/concepts, and get notification whenever anyone, anywhere on the web writes about them. This includes online newspaper/magazines articles, blogs, forums, and more. RSS allows me to tap into a live, global, non-stop, river of conversation on my topics of interest, all delivered to my browser, through my RSS reader. This is big stuff (though it is going almost unnoticed amongst mainstream educators).

Note, however, that the participative web goes way beyond just high-speed access to information. It also enables us to form learning networks that include people, conversations, and information. This is a crucial development that we need to understand.

Networks offer radically new ways to organize learning. First, information can be presented in non-linear, and HTML formats. This frees the learner to explore it in ways that books do not. Secondly, the ability to participate (it’s now a two-way medium) moves us beyond a one-to-many format towards the many-to-many learning format, opening the door to anyone who wishes to participate, share, assist, or converse. Lecture formats don’t work particularly well on the web, but even where we do use them we can add readers’ comments and interpretations to create something new.

We’re uncovering ways to learn that are more efficient by orders of magnitude than the lecture format, ways that naturally challenge it, add to it, and take us beyond the single interpretation - that is, without having to synthesize information into a single perspective. Although it’s mass collaboration, and although it enables the co-creation of meaning, it does so in a granular way that preserves individual viewpoints. Peer-to-peer learning, then, is blurring the lines between what we used to neatly call teachers and students. Wikipedia is one type of example, but it’s actually happening everywhere, in various formats, and it’s something we have seen time and again on ChinesePod.

Consider the role of blogs in this scenario. They’re where you go to get the very latest knowledge on almost any subject. (By contrast, books in a library can be years out of date, for all we know.) Bloggers tend to narrow their focus to specific areas. There are hundreds of thousands of specialist blogs on the web, many written by talented, insightful individuals, and leaders in their fields. (You have to seek out the good ones, of course.) When you find something of value, you simply bookmark it or include it in your reader where it becomes part of your learning network.

I’d like to stay with blogs for a second, because they have many other features that make them well suited to learning and illustrate the new paradigm:

• They’re about people. All the discussion about technology sometimes confuses the issue. Learning is an exclusively human activity, done by humans, for the benefit of humans. Blogs aren’t lifeless databases of information. They are more like conversations with real people with whom we can connect and learn from.
• They’re free and accessible. Knowledge is not closed off to us on blogs. We don’t even need as much as a registration to access even the most valuable of them.
• Comments. Comments add nuance, perspectives, shades of opinon, and lead to a deeper understanding of the topic. Good posts also attract smart comments and a virtuous circle of participation and understanding.
• Links. Bloggers who know a lot about their fields tend to link to others in related fields. This broadens the conversation and the resources.
• Archives. These act as a kind of extended memory for the writer (not to mention the reader). It’s also a very handy resource of ideas that don’t need to be written and re-written (or even photocopied) no matter how many people wish to read them.

Right now, I have about 100 or so blogs on my list of favorites. Each has a different area of specialization and a different take on things. I know where to go to seek the types of ideas and information I may need. In addition, tagging, social bookmarking, blog search, instant messaging, as well as podcasts, video, and other tools all serve to enhance my learning network. But of course, I’m not passively consuming all this stuff. I also connect with people on my network through blogs, social networks, email, instant messaging, etc. I think you get my drift.

Clearly, we are all now learning from each other, not just from a caste of professors or experts. I see it as the best of both worlds, in a sense. George Siemens calls this the ‘rise of everyone‘. I take this to mean, not ‘the rise of the common man’ in some collectivist sense, but in this sense that every individual now has a voice in the Big Conversation. We’re about to see what happens when one billion people start to mobilize these resources to learn and do new things.

In Chapter One of Finnegan’s Wake, the protagonist sails into Dublin Bay (from Scandanavia, no less) after Finnegan, the hod-carrier dies. The new chap takes over the story, but he’s not a simple fellow. He speaks in riddles, puns, and multiple languages simultaneously as if to represent multiple perspectives and signify change. His name was Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, HCE for short, or Here Comes Everybody. I think he’s relevant. I’ll talk more about him in a later post.

Ken Carroll

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.