Sunday, October 07, 2007

Change is all about learning new ways..

We keep seeing how change is accelerating and how many more possible directions there are with the abundance of technology and money and new and global players.

The pressing question is what the user (Mr Same Guy in his roles as citizen, consumer and employee) will adopt - what will catch his eye and how will it be taken into use and begin to grow.

When we want to further this - and it is mostly a question of really useful and good-for-society-at-large digitalization - we need to think about (i) how we can offer familiar tools for new purposes - economy of repetition, (ii) how existing tools can be improved - economy of reuse and (iii) how we should rethink learning.

Rethink learning?

Learning in the past was - and still too much is "Just in case". We cannot afford that any more. With the information overflow and exploding number of new technology opportunities we have to move to "Just in time".

It is a major change (picking mostly from Teemu Arina's eminent presentations):

Just in time learning by understanding

    • That technology is the extension of our bodies (Marshall McLuhan) 
    • That the Internet and its networking is making it possible for humans to overcome the restrictions set by physical environments
    • How experiences are shared - 100 million videos (65 000 new) watched every day on Youtube 2006)
    • How moments are shared - 100 million pictures (1 million a day) on Flickr 2006
    • How links are shared - 53 million posts on 25 million links on del.icio.us 2006
    • How the heard is shared - over 2 million podcasts (Odeo 2006)
    • How reflections are shared - blogs are a part of the identity building - the web is and extension of our identity. 60 million blogs (Technorati 2006)
    • How innovations are moving from top-down to bottom-up - starting from online communities, crowdsourcing and social media.
    • How information overflow can lead to pattern recognition
    • How the long tail is enabled and enabling new value
    • How we are moving from pre-filtering to post-filtering
    • How collective intelligence works - mass collaboration, wisdom of crowds, Google etc

Above all this is learning by doing - using blogs, YouTubes, Facebooks, LinkedIns,Wikipedias, Jaikus and many more. We all have been amazed at how fast kids can learn languages and technology by just playing around with computers. Now it is time to realize that this also goes for us - when moving from just in case to just in time - because:

"What I hear, I forget.

What I see, I remember.

And what I do, I understand.“

We shape our tools - and afterwards the tools shape us. This is why Nicholas Negroponte's "One Laptop per Child" is so important.

2 comments:

Teemu said...

Learning to be, rather than learning about.

BoHarald said...

good point - more in line with the nature of man..

http://www.meebo.com/rooms