Today I wrote to a friend an explanation of why education should be reconfigured around how centers focus networks that mirror online knowledge to learning minds. What I sent him follows.
I am trying to tease out the underlying step: explaining the need to reconfigure education around the emergent open commons network of what is known by humankind. A useful tool in this thinking is the idea of the center. When Johnny is looking at and thinking about the Planck animation that I posted yesterday, there are at least three centers in play:
- Johnny as a student is an individual center. It is Johnny, not the class, who is actively learning about Planck no matter what other kids are doing in his vicinity (even also learning);
- Planck has become the center in Johnny’s active mind, connecting to other places in his mental network of what he knows and emerging new patterns with Planck at the center:
- Johnny is interacting with a node online that is a center of whatever it is connected to out there — and to the extent that the ESA scientists have put relevant links on the Planck page, that center can be very rich cognitively.
The educational elegance is that these patterns mirror each other. I think the online pattern Johnny experiences mirrors Planck knowledge into his mind (where he learns it — the pattern is established there) because both the knowledge online and in his mind are matrixed in networks. If this is true, what possible excuse is there for not reconfiguring education around this new relationship of human minds with what is known by humankind?
Of related interest, of course, is that a group of students (such as a class) also have networks of interaction. But social networking is a separate phenomenon from the networking within an individual mind as it mirrors and resonates with the networking of ideas — as his mind interfaces their cognitive networking online.
