He's got a fun name to say. It's like a dinosaur or a fantasy warrior. "Beware! Hargadon draws near!" Anyway.
This is in reply to http://www.stevehargadon.com/2008/03/web-20-is-future-of-education.html and is based on my thoughts about the trends he observes.
Trend #1: A new publishing revolution. This seems quite likely. We have a lot more ability to produce material now. I think as these things become more and more ubiquitous we will see them being more and more widely incorporated, although I expect there will be other effects - for instance, it will possibly be another pressure on or against minority languages, although I suppose it's equally possible that minority language speakers will simply make sure to adopt one of the other major tongues and keep their own mama-loshen, possibly leavening their use of English (or chinese or Russian or whatever) with that native language.
Trend #2: A tidal wave of content. I think this is true; when I read the comment threads of blogs I often see a lot of things.
Except that I don't think this is really information. So many of these are often cut from the same cookie cutter mold; in my case I tend to read the Huffington Post, and if I, to use a hoary old analogy, had a dollar for every time I'd seen a man produce the following post:
"Man, you all are just hating on $conservativeentity. You libs are hilarious, or would be, if you didn't make me sick." etc. etc.
I would probably be able to buy a new car. (Nota bene: I'm sure there are equally perpetual posting memes in other communities.)
Many people have a lot of things to say, but, this call to create content seems to be making it totemic. I am certainly, to use this very act I am engaging in as an analogy, learning about writing in a blog - though I was an early adopter of this thanks to livejournal - and it may well be very useful when I should perhaps later in life create a blog of my own. And yet, I don't feel that it fundamentally empowers me, and it doesn't grant me some new gift from the heavens to peer through a vast sea of repetitive goading comments.
Trend 3: Everything becoming participative. Yes - to an extent, I agree with him.
But then my relationship with books is different from his. I enjoy them, but generally speaking when I go to buy anything I am looking with some idea of what I already want. I do not go browsing for books to buy unless I should, say, get a bookstore gift card. That said, these factors provide information, information I have just never really thought to consult.
As for the Kindle, it has advantages, but so do the current version of books. When bookreaders are cheap enough that you can buy one for the same cost as a Gameboy or a textbook, and rugged and reliable enough that I can read one on the toilet or in the bathtub, then we can talk.
I do not think the electronic dialogue he describes is going to be productive without active moderation. I cite here two examples:
One is Roger Ebert's blog, which is directly maintained by Ebert himself. He goes through the threads and replies to people (as he wants, as he pleases; as he himself pointed out in a reply I read once, "On this blog I'm the boss.") People post the usual thing -- whenever he makes a political comment he is accused of the most perfidious of biases, whenever he makes a religious comment there is the usual churning argument over faith vs. reason etc. He replies to them.
The other is the Something Awful humor website's forum community, which is large and active and has many fields of endeavor. Many of these are dedicated to pursuits which appeal to the "goon" (as they dubbed themselves) community - for instance, private servers for online games, or discussion of those online games. And yet, in the "Ask/Tell" forum's section, a question about a new form of unusual shoe may sit next to "Tell me about nuclear power!", which will sit next to "Tell me about having children - A parenting megathread!" (Megathreads in this sense being a discussion thread that is not quite large enough to gain its own subforum.)
So how does this mess work? It's simple.
The forum is run as a small business by Rich Kyanka, the founder of the website. He has moderators, who I believe are community volunteers but are also possibly to some extent his employees. Individuals who misbehave are barred from posting for a while, and often verbally dressed down; those whose 'crimes' are more severe are banned, which is a strong disincentive as registering for the forums requires ten dollars. (Severe or repeat offenders may be "permabanned;" an individual who is merely banned may restore his account for ten dollars.)
While there are some bells and whistles that can be bought, essentially twenty dollars and not being a fool will gain lifetime access to this community. I think this is a model which may be able to expand outwards - or at least be looked at by other discussion matters.
Trend #4: The new "prosumer."
I like his concept here. I hate the word.
I think that for educational matters this could probably be useful, as a concept anyway, because individuals interested in, for instance, learning a foreign language might be able to share drills which they develop themselves and found especially useful. These tips and tricks could be shared around and put to a practical test, and further, the nature of the internet, where one can store large quantities of information fairly trivially (especially if it is simple still images and text), means that if - for instance - a man in Indiana's Japanese kanji drills are not terribly popular or useful for his classmates, they might be discovered, to great profit, by a class in South Korea two years later.
Trend #5: The age of the collaborator.
Maybe. Maybe.
Here is the thing that I believe Steve overlooks. (Other than the fact that a hundred and fifty years ago, at least in nearly all cultures in the world, a guy who can't digest milk, gets sunburned easily, and has a bum foot, would have been put to SOME use. Maybe his family come from PNG hunter-gatherer stock. I have no idea.)
His idea requires open and free communication and collaborative scholarship to be, I suppose I would say, be prone to finding the truth -- and I think it is quite possible for there to be an open and active and vibrant and energetic community dedicated, for instance, to proving that reality as we know it is in fact an illusion created by the Matrix, or that the September 11th attacks were done by the US government (or the Zionist Occupation Government), or that a certain race is in fact quantifiably superior.
And maybe this is an inevitable side effect... certainly, the fact that Mein Kampf was published on a printing press does not defame the printing press. However, it is possible for bad information, particularly if that bad information seems to fill a human emotional need or a prevailing prejudice better (and oh yes, we are all filled of prejudices; not all of them evil, either) to become "common knowledge." Chinese newspapers have cited The Onion, a comedy newspaper - multiple times. (I am sure American newspapers have done comparable things.)
And it may become ever increasingly possible to live in your own private sphere. It may even be inevitable, and it may well be that these possibilities, even if they come to fruition, will be well worth the costs they bear. But there WILL be costs in the change, as well as benefits.
I suppose then that as educators our greatest role is to teach, constantly in a thousand ways, the need to look at many views, to judge the use of evidence, and perhaps most pressingly, to teach people to seek the truth of the matter, or as close as they can get -- even if that truth may make them personally uncomfortable.
#6-10 later when it's not 5 AM! Isn't this exciting?!