Emergent Learning Networks
Sometimes it seems that we are in a constant state of change and
innovation. It's both exciting and worrisome in that it is fun to feel
like we are working in the vanguard of new ways of thinking and
learning and it's troublesome to think that the vanguard may be the
status quo from now on. We are all going to have to operate in a
continuous mode of rapid change and evolution.
To that end I am going to use our
public blog to write about some of the things I am learning that are
informing our new products and services. In the last post on this blog,
Glen referenced our move from learning programs to learning networks.
This move is a new business model for us. As Jeff Jarvis points out, “you don’t want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own.
Every year at this point in time I start a new business plan. It
seems to be tied to the cycle of “back-to-school.” The new academic
year is beginning and I find myself starting over in terms of thinking
about what we do and how we do it. This year it feels particularly
important as there are many new things to be done with new, better,
more compelling tools. Like the consumer side of the web, which has
exploded with blogs and podcasts, professional learning is ripe for
renewal and innovation using not only new technologies like RSS but
also new ways of thinking about learning.
I started to move in a new direction in 2003 when I saw what was
happening with the Dean campaign. At the same time I read a couple of
important new books (Emergence, by Steve Johnson and The Wisdom of Crowds
by James Suroweicki) that really opened my eyes to the power of
emergent networks and collective intelligence. Since then we have
swapped out traditional course management software for blogs and
aggregators. We have seen transformational results in our program-based
learning and we are looking at how to extend these new methods,
technologies, and systems into continuous learning networks.
Just like in the wider web, technology has for professional
learning not yet fulfilled its original promise. It was supposed to be
all about content and the ability to distribute content cheaply and
efficiently. But we discovered that technology-based learning was
expensive to produce and did not really deliver value relative to its
cost. E-learning has become a commodity, so much so that our self-paced
e-learning project was outsourced to India before we could even get
started on it.
We know that people learn best from one another in the context of
their rapidly and continuously changing professional lives. We also
know that there is way too much content. The total number of web pages
now exceeds 600 billion–100 pages for each person alive on the planet.
It is no wonder that Google is taking over the universe these days. Web
sites have become islands which require too much effort to go seek out.
And email systems have become Gilligan's Island, often over run with
spam and chaff.
And out of these problems there has emerged a new protocol called
RSS (short for Really Simple Syndication) that is enabling the creation
of smart channels, collaborative learning, easy publishing and sharing.
RSS was invented by Dave Winer in order to solve his own problem of
better communication with a network of readers. He developed the blog
to be able to update his web site without calling in an html
programmer. Then he developed RSS so that people who read his web site
could stay in touch with newly updated information. And he started the
next revolution.
I'll stop here for today. But tomorrow, I'm going to outline some
of the things I have been learning about the dynamics of this new world
and the economy in which we work. This economy has been called the
Internet economy, but I prefer a term described by Yochai Benkler, a
Yale Law School professor and economist who calls this era the
“networked information economy.” Here's how he defines it in a paper originally delivered at Duke Law School on March 26, 2002:
Explore posts in the same categories: Learning 2.0 Services
an economy of information knowledge, and culture that flow through society over a ubiquitous, decentralized network.”
