Posted on 18th March 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | General
mind_mirror, mirror_mind
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.
Posted on 25th January 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability
knowledge, mind_mirror, mirror_mind, network, networks, organize
A recent GoldenSwamp.com post posits how knowledge for learning is growing as a superorganism from which everyone on earth can learn. That superorganism is a network that lives within the open internet. The first image (above) sketches how the learning mind, which is a network, can directly apprehend patterns of knowledge from the network that forms the superorganism online of what is known by humankind. That apprehending can be thought of as the mind mirroring patterns it encounters on the internet.
If the learning mind can apprehend knowledge patterns from the emergent knowledge online, why then is it that we spend $$ billions every year on systems of knowledge delivery to education that look something like the second image (below)? Would it not make more sense to curate the online knowledge nodes and network, refining them to signal among themselves to create cognitive patterns to mirror directly into learning minds?
The education establishment has assumed from the beginning of the internet era that it was they who should judge, select, and organize knowledge to be learned that is located on the internet. There is a fatal flaw in those assumptions: in the open internet, the knowledge self-judges, self-selects, and organizes itself better than those things can be done by educators because human knowledge is itself a network and obeys network laws. My statement here is radical, I know. It is also a fact of the internet that is morphing learning resources into the superorganism of what is known by humankind. It is a truth too beautiful not to be true and enormously hopeful for the global future.
The subject networks in the images above are from the Map of Science, which is described in PLoS One. The networking — linking — among subjects has occurred naturally. When you look at the map you are seeing real world online cognitive connectivity.
