Desk Cleaning

I've been cleaning out files, something I do every once in a great while and I came across something I wrote at least two and a half years ago. Since I think it's still timely and useful, I thought I'd post it here:

Principles to guide us in building new visions for online communication, education, learning, and community building

• The Web is a conversation (so says The Cluetrain Manifesto)
• Conversations flow two ways
• Engagement will take on forms we have not yet imagined
• If we enter this arena with enthusiasm and flexibility we will garner long-term, deep support for our services and programs
• Our services and programs will no longer flow from the inside out
• Web learning and community will change power structures
• Control will flow in all directions
• Universities will not 'control' the conversation though they can be immeasureably influential both in the conversations that take place and in the resources available for progress and decision making
• All of us will be decision makers in the future of learning and development
• Objectivity is a myth
• Resources will be necessary to begin and to maintain the conversation
• People learn quickly when their interests motivate them to do so and when there's a social aspect to the learning process
• Online teaching and facilitating require as much or more interactive social skill as traditional teaching, however, the people who are naturally excellent at online communication may not be the same people who excel at face-to-face communication
• Community creates learning
• Just-in-time learning is only one piece (and is really just-in-time information)
• We don't know what we don't know
• If we don't know what we don't know, we won't go looking for it
• Information is not learning
• Knowledge doesn't put itself online
• Energy is contagious
• If we have to 'make' people do it then we haven't gotten it right yet

'The Web is a conversation is one of the central tenets of The Cluetrain Manifesto. We characterize the Web as a source of information, but its appeal and its potential is the ease with which it makes possible connections, community, and conversation. When you look at the Web in this way a number of things become clear.

In an issue of JOHO (Journal of Hyperlinked Organization), David Weinberger says, speaking of the connections the Internet now makes possible: "We are, I believe, at an 'inflection point.' We thought we were answering email but we were instead building a world."

One of the outcomes of the web as a conversation is that it's increasingly informal. When most of our business communication is online, this informality permeates everything we do. The lines among people change and blue.

People don't come to the web for formal instruciton, for three credit hour classes, They come for conversation, for communities of practice, for interactive conversational learning, for informality and control. Organizing successful classes on the web will require stepping firmly out of semester, credit-hour, program-based education.

Other notes:
It's a truism that kids are great at new technologies and that the rest of us can only scramble helplessly, out of touch and behind. The true picture is, as with most truisms, vastly more complex. Conversations and learning communities began with FidoNet and Genie and other services even before the Internet, at least ten to fifteen years ago. The people who started those conversations, even if in their teens and twenties then (which many of them weren't) are now in their thirties and forties. And many of them enthusiastically participate in online communities to this day. Senior citizens are one of the fastest growing users of computers--becuase computers give them access to community and to learning at a time when their physical limitations may be increasing. People who are remote and isolated for whatever reason turn, even now, to the Internet for community, contact, and learning. They don't necessarily turn to universities for these things, but they're out there looking.

People will learn what interests them. People will generate energy when they're excited.

We reveal ourselves on the Web almost always in terms of our interests....David Weinberger

Tell us some good stories and capture our interest. Dn't talk to us as if you've forgotten how to speak. Don't make us feel small. Remind us to be larger. Get a little of that human touch....The Cluetrain Manifesto

Posted by dcoates at December 23, 2003 11:07 AM