[P2P-F] Solid State, and Liquid Nets

[Kevin Carson]

  Sent to you by Kevin Carson via Google Reader: Solid State, and Liquid
Nets via Andrew B. Watt's Blog by Andrew on 2/27/11

First watch this talk,

And then this one.

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Back? Feel like you wasted forty minutes of your life? OK, I’m sorry.
Tell you what… you don’t need to read this entry of my blog. Then you
won’t have wasted an hour. That should save you some time.

But if you’re planning on sticking around, know that this is some of
the problem I’m wrestling with. It may, in fact, be the problem that
teachers all around the world are wrestling with. To sum it up as
clearly as I can:

How do we take solid-state schools — that is, institutions that are
designed to do one thing according to a model with relatively little
variability — and graft onto them these liquid networks, which are
flexible, innovating, and constantly learning new skills and trading
new ideas?

I had dinner with a friend of mine last night, and we kept talking
around the question. He’s a floral designer, an artist, an actor, a
writer, a playwright, a director, and a sculptor, and he’s getting to
be nationally known. So when he tells me that (for him) it was all
about developing fluency with a set of tools, I tend to believe him.
When I asked him to identify his four most important tools, he spoke of
his knife, the bowls and urns and vases that contain his work, the
flowers themselves, and glue. He said, “without wire, I’d need glue.
With wire, I’d still need glue.”

I know that working with cord and twine and rope, I gain fluency by
learning new knots. The more knots I know, the more interesting and
unusual things I do. Same with artists’ pens and paper — the more kinds
I work with, the better I do as an artist.

All through this vacation which ends tomorrow, I’ve been wondering
about how to help my students develop their own liquid networks —
systems of self-support and learning environments that help them find
the information they want, instead of forcing specific information at
them. I think it’s one of the major challenges of our time, and I wish
I knew how to move the conversation forward.

Filed under: Teaching
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