Education at Hogwarts was shaken to the core by the murder of Albus P. W. B. Dumbledore the greatest Headmaster Hogwarts had ever seen. He was killed at the age of 116 years by Severus Snape, his friend. On the above video you can watch his scheduled death, memories and mourners.
Among the mourners seen in the video is Dumbledore’s phoenix bird Fawkes. Tears come to his eyes. He then catches fire and burns down — a mystical capacity of the phoenix species.
In education of our time, there are forces both old and new that are killing old time educational institutions and practices. These forces include friendly changes in the digital area and destructive influences of welfare statism, unionists, and prodigal spending that is running governments out of money that could be used for schools.
The happy (real or imagined) days of our Dumbledore Hogwarts schools are over. We cannot go back.
Fawkes reminds us that the future can be new, fresh, and exciting. We can move on from Hogwarts to something completely reborn. To get that done, we need to focus not on rebuilding Hogwarts — but on the concept of a new Fawkes. Is this a negative and frightening path? Quite the contrary. The bright new pheonix of 21st century learning — already stirring and peeping — will provide young wizards of the future with a global commons of knowledge and learning — plus a new generation of teaching Dumbledores who do not have to watch their back for bureaucrats casting negative spells.
A concept came up today in my email discourse that I quoted in my last post. My friend asked me what I thought about this concern, which is quoted from a New York Review of Books article: “the digital cloud will merge or be merged — will ‘mash up’— to form a single, communal, autonomous intelligence.”
What follows was my response that I wrote to my friend. It is relevant in a major way to handschooling and the connection it provides to students to what is known by humankind, now networking in the digital cloud.
As to the cloud turning in a brain, I have never seen how folks make that leap. I have been challenged with the idea for decades. When I was a child, my science prodigy older brother assured me that robots would reproduce themselves and take us over. The AI people have been trying to make a fundamental step that has eluded them for a very long time. But I do not see how any of that is even an issue in relocation of “the sum total of what is known by humankind” (from a Webster’s definition of knowledge) into the open internet. That sum total can be expected to elegantly organize itself online as the network it is — rejecting junk and exhibiting idea patterns using the best nodes.
If you were to take the knowledge bits now embedded in every curriculum, textbook, library, specialized human brain — breaking everything into separate bits — and dumping them all into the open internet, what do you think would happen? Would they mash themselves together in weird ways and begin thinking on their own? How can anyone suppose something like that? There is no basis and no mechanism given.
What is absolutely amazing is that in the past 20 years, that dump has actually happened! The relocation continues to greater and greater levels of detail — such as now the contents of thousands of printed book flowing online as searchable hypertext. The contents of the enormous virtual dumping ground are not turning into a thinking giant. What are they doing? Ted Nelson put best: “Everything intertwingles.
The result is a complexity in which emergence causes the best bits of, for example, algebra to link to each other and rise to the top of search engines. Order out of chaos is what to expect from intertwingling — not autonomous intelligence. The junk falls away as networks of the best nodes link into meaningful patterns.
The blogosphere is a clear demonstration of these network vetting laws at work. There are millions upon millions of blogs, with only a few gorillas in any topic (note the long tail effect). The fact that this natural network vetting is not how educational resources are selected is scandalous. (Contrast ongoing Texas textbook wars).
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.
UPDATE: This has been revised: Findability and Commons are combined and the new section Next is added. The heading beneath the logo is slightly revised. Handschooling.com is a work in progress. Thanks for your patience. Judy
The heading beneath the logo is:
Meet the new phoenix arising from the ashes of failed education, and help it take off
There are pages being developed to replace the roughly sketched ones now online for these 5 areas of action:
1 Mobiles
2 Findability
3 Nurture
4 Next
5 Politics
The purpose of Handschooling.com is to explain and illustrate the 5 areas and to make practical suggestions for action by readers in each of them. This blog is about how to use our talents, resources, and influence as educators, parents, and citizens during the transition from analog schooling to the new schooling arising around the global knowledge commons.
Hopefully, I am not overdoing the bird! Several readers have sent positive comments since my last post about the metaphor of the phoenix for what is happening to education. The phoenix myth has persisted in several cultures for many centuries, as reflected in the manuscripts and images collected in The Medieval Bestiary, the source of the images in this post. The idea is a powerful one that rings true. The phoenix reminds us that sometimes it is better to let an old institution go up in flames, and then to enjoy a creative rebirth. Handschooling.com focuses on the new young fledgling of 21st century learning — which is now like the little fellow spreading his wings here: A phoenix rising from the still-glowing ashes of the fire that consumed its previous incarnation.
Although we still await the full conflagration of schooling’s aging analog-cored incarnation, here we turn our attention and support to the exciting new fledgling.
Why future education is emerging around handschooling
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Soon every student will be connecting directly with the global knowledge commons. Schooling has to be reconfigured around this fundamental change.
The strong echo continues in schools and across the world of what Jonathan Kozol indelibly named savage inequalities. The mobile window opens a global commons that is the same for each and oblivious to who is visiting it to learn.
Among the mourners seen in the video is Dumbledore’s phoenix bird Fawkes. Tears come to his eyes. He then catches fire and burns down — a mystical capacity of the phoenix species.
