[iDC] Can DIY education be crowdsourced?

[John Hopkins]

John:

I understand that on this list contemporary levels of technological mediation 
are celebrated are augmenting education as a process of socialization (vs 
perhaps a strengthening of community).  My assumptions regarding this is to 
maintain a strong consciousness of what is a gradually shifting base-line of 
human connection.  I believe that the embodied meatspace messiness of the 
encounter of the Self with the (unknown) Other is the baseline for any social 
learning process.  This is the origin of my comments...

> As Jon said, we'd like to think about how community sites and online social mediators can contribute to self education.

(DIY) Learning has to be relevant, and that relevancy needs to be delineated by 
those who are participating in the community (of learners).  As long as 
'crowd-sourcing' is a term that describes that participatory (community) 
engagement it will describe the optimal process of generating collective 
knowledge.  But if it begins to bleed over into dominantly external sourcing of 
knowledge that is not purely relevant to the community of learners it should 
become the object of tempered suspicion as to its (ir)relevancy to the 
community.  I believe that transcendent (and thus fully relevant) knowledge may 
be generated locally by any grouping of individuals who have attentive and open 
engagement with each Other.  There is no particular need to search externally 
for knowledge -- and in our time, this flood of external (hyper-socializing) 
knowledge is becoming particularly problematic...

hmmm.

A community without any f-2-f component who attempts this generation of relevant 
knowledge promulgates an increasing degree of deeply operating alienation 
because sustained f-2-f engagement will reveal far more profound difference and 
thus, more profound effort must be made to find the corresponding relevancy, 
which leads to stronger community ties.  The greater the techno-social mediation 
of community, the greater the ease in finding surficial relevancy which supports 
(only) relatively weaker ties.

A particular example of this (only covertly insidious, but indicative of the 
breadth of the process operating in 'our' social system):

http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/archives/3402

jh


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John Hopkins
exploring cosmological patterns of flow @
http://neoscenes.net/
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
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