Warning: Communication contains the seeds of our destruction
4 min read
Thanks to a recent blog post from Ben Werdmuller, I came across a fantastic article: Andrew Keen's post on CBSNews.com where he compares Web 2.0 to Marxism. His work provided me with the impetus to articulate ideas that had I had yet to fully examine. For providing me with that opportunity, I am glad that Andrew Keen is a collaborative creator within the blogging community. One of the opinions Keen states:
In the Web 2.0 world, however, the nightmare is not the scarcity, but the over-abundance of authors.
He goes on:
But one of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 future may well be that everyone is an author, while there is no longer any audience.
While I suspect that he is attempting to imply that everybody will be too busy writing down their own thoughts to read the ideas of others, this doesn't make sense. People communicate. When people communicate, they use the tools available to them. Currently, blogs are one of those tools. Complaining about excessive blogging in 2006 is analogous to complaining about too much talking in the Agora circa Pericles.
But the last paragraph is probably my favorite part:
Without an elite mainstream media, we will lose our memory for things learnt, read, experienced, or heard. The cultural consequences of this are dire, requiring the authoritative voice of at least an Allan Bloom, if not an Oswald Spengler. But here in Silicon Valley, on the brink of the Web 2.0 epoch, there no longer are any Blooms or Spenglers. All we have is the great seduction of citizen media, democratized content and authentic online communities. And weblogs, course. Millions and millions of blogs.
Personally, I can't wait for the "elite media" to get their hands around internet content. That will save me the hassle of finding and evaluating interesting things for myself, thus freeing hours of my time.
After my descent into the intellectual morass that is Andrew Keen's prose, I was glad to encounter Linda Christensen's article in the online version of Rethinking Schools about her work with the Portland Writing Project and the Summer Curriculum Camps. In her article, she describes how teachers work with other educators to develop curriculum and support one another through peer-driven professional development.
Our intention is not for teachers to grab this particular unit and slavishly follow the lessons; instead we aim to equip teachers to think in interdisciplinary terms and see themselves as curriculum developers, not consumers of other people's curriculum.
Additionally:
The Portland Writing Project models the pedagogy it hopes teachers will take back to their classrooms, but it also encourages teachers to constantly reflect on their classroom practice and revise their teaching based on their observations.
The Portland Writing Project represents a nice blend of theory and practice. Teachers learn through a model they can replicate in their own classrooms. As they work, they develop curriculum designed specifically for their classes. This curriculum pulls from and is refined by the shared experience of working teachers. Over time, teachers have the opportunity to revise the curriculum with ongoing peer support. Most importantly, when teachers have trained in a learner-centered environment, they can articulate the value of that environment from firsthand experience.
As the process of the Portland Writing Project is described, technology does not play a large role. However, many of the elements of the Portland Writing Project mirror elements of online coursework. Both processes empower the voices of individuals working within the group. Both processes provide access to peer feedback, which helps individuals revise and develop their ideas. Both processes encourage an attitude that views learning as a blend of experience, scholarship, and dialogue.
And this is what Keen misses. Online collaboration and social networking, used wisely, are about communicating. In the right environment, individual voices help hone other individual voices. Keen equates this process to "the flat noise of opinion," which leads to his prediction that "we will lose our memory for things learnt, read, experienced, or heard."
I have experienced the opposite. As people form and state opinions, they are pushed to express their ideas more clearly, and to provide support for those opinions. Community, at it's best, empowers the individual to speak, and challenges the individual to formulate ideas clearly. The flat noise of opinion? It sounds like the early stages of learning to me.
