From the Writing for the Web blog by Crawford Killian
Link

Dan Baum has a fascinating article in The New Yorker
about the US Army's painful but promising transition from a top-down,
one-way “instrumentalist” communication model to a two-way interactive
online communication model. Soldiers on the ground in Iraq are now
using websites to share their experience and lessons learned with
colleagues still in training.

Educators are still slow in understanding the significance of the
interactive “constructivist” model as an inherent trait of
computer-based communications. While I consider the US Army the
greatest single educational institution in history, it's clearly just
as hidebound as most of us civilians. But Baum argues that Gen-X
officers and men are more imaginative, and less respectful of
hierarchy, than their Boomer superiors. They also take the Internet for
granted, so the interactive, “horizontal” constructivist model is
something they've grown up with.

Whatever your views of the war (and mine are highly negative), this is an important glimpse into the way the Web is changing us.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 24th, 2005 at 2:35 pm and is filed under E-Learning. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.