I came to this after viewing your presentation on “Lifelong learning and teaching in the digital age”

I guess everything has been said, so I will just add: this is the vision of what new media, open source and the culture of sharing is capable of doing. Perhaps a huge global village where everyone shares what and how they do things. Everyone continuously learns and perfects their crafts (and themselves) and humanity moves ahead.

In some ways, of course, sharing is becoming ridiculously easy to do. Mostly unconscious, even, as when we share aspects of our daily lives online.

What always was and always will be hard is the distillation of experience and formulation of knowledge. But there are necessary and unnecessary difficulties there.

It is necessarily hard to extract principles from practices, and articulate them usefully.

It used to be unnecessarily hard to share the products of that extraction, but we’re now sweeping away that unnecessary difficulty.

Because of that, it may get a bit easier to do the necessarily hard work. Mainly because we can thrive on the feedback. As we leave cognition prints (http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=635) in the network for others to find, and as others do dust for them, and find them, and react to them, it feels good, and we want to keep doing it.

This one’s huge, Jon. Just huge. I haven’t even finished it yet because it’s just so overwhelming for me, on every level. Koranteng really nails it so I won’t repeat his ideas, but I will say that this sentence stopped me dead in my tracks:

“Well, yes, it’s not unique but special that I have this compulsion to share what I’m learning and figuring out.”

That’s it; that’s it exactly. That’s what we call teaching. And I believe education at its best is at least partly about waking and empowering that compulsion by introducing the learner to the splendid sharing compulsion that’s gotten civilization and culture to this place, this time, this now. The building is one thing. The sharing of the building is where Engelbart’s level “c” really takes off. It’s hard because of trust, value, identity issues. Sure. Sharing is perhaps the hardest thing we try to do. And we do get burned, badly. But we have no alternative if we want to be different, to make a difference.

I sure wish I could hear the audio, but I’m sure happy you posted the transcript. Thank you.

When I was young I became educated–Information.

As I worked through my life I accumulated experience–Information + Experience = Knowledge.

Now I become old and share what I know–Shared Knowledge is Wisdom.

John
by hammer and hand great works do stand
by mind and heart we share the art

Historical and institutional memory curated and distilled, conversations and processes reified, the blurring of consumption and production, all these get revisited on the internet…

I was also interested in both of your takes on the cultural themes and thought I’d offer a little note.

There’s a Akan proverb about knowledge that defines it in a phrase roughly translated as “I have the knowledge and have kept it”. The meaning was often taken to be one about retention, namely that “I have learned something and retained it”. Some dwell on the saying and focus not on the comprehension and acquisition themes, but on the ‘kept it’ aspect, and inordinately so. So we have traditions of keeping knowledge close to one’s chest and there’s opacity about how things get done or the basis of knowledge – the bits about trade secrecy, black boxes, the alienation from labour, property and capital…

In the internet era, it seems that we are in the realm of “I have learned something and I have shared it”. That in balancing participation and control, we should favour the sharing. I kind of like that notion.

P.S. Jon, I noticed that this post is “uncategorized” in wordpress. I guess you must rely on the social bookmarks for your annotation.