Another TED Favorite

Lawerence Lessig's book Remix is coming this fall. His idea of how creativity among the masses has been stifled is quite interesting. He compares it to a programing language. In the beginning there was Read/Write with families telling stories, singing songs, etc. Then came the age of television and radio. Only a select few were still creating, WRITE, while the masses consumed, READ. And now with Internet technologies this is changing again, and it looks something like from days' past. View the presentation given at TED in 2007. I think Lawerence is on to something.

On a side note, I'm also becoming interested in the idea of slow communities and this concept of network withdraw from "fast" communities. Is going on a 5 day vacation without a network connection that detrimintal to someone's health? Will Richardson seems to be feeling the pain and introduces the idea of slow communities he learned from Nancy White.

Where the web is today...

I learned about the physicist Freeman Dyson and his passion for searching for life among the outer planets of the solar system. In so doing, I stumbled across the following quote that I believe describes the current state of web 2.0 tools and online learning. We're building thousands of weird models of applications for sharing, contributing, and networking. Many of which fail within the first few months of being launched while others are immediate solutions to the larger masses, ie YouTube.

"You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works - it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential."

-Freeman Dyson

Aloha blogosphere

David Warlick and Will Richardson arrived in Honolulu last week at Kūkulu Kaiaulu 2.0: Building Global Communities conference. The buz words were creating personal learning communities. Through the power of Web 2.o technologies to connect people and ideas, knowledge creation is different now.

These two individuals inspired me to give it one more go. Through the power of RSS, wiki's and blogs, I saw a potential for learning that I never before imagined. An environment where learning is personal, customized, immediate. For the first time, information had a face, a family, and the ability to talk back.

I'm a recent Graduate and Instructional Designer for an online doctorate program. The purpose for this blog is to have conversations about online learning, mentoring, education, and technology. Learning is different now, so they say.