The New Reality
Today we are living in a new reality: the reality of digital media as catalyzed by new forms of social media.
Digitalization can be characterized as the avant-garde of our society today, as digital services push the known boundaries of media and relationships within.
The shift in ways of doing and relating requires new participative architectures to understand the move from the age of speed (industrialization and mass-production) to the age of real-time (digitalization and masscustomization as affected by new forms of social processes, i.e. Web 2.0). (Arina & Inkinen 2007)
For an industrial worker, speed and repetition were key.
For a knowledge worker new modes of working are activated when the culture of speed is replaced with real-time processes and repetition is complemented with non-linearity and contextual adaptive applications.
Knowledge work (Drucker) becomes network work when the nodes become less important than the network formation activities themselves.
Learning Differently
Looking at learning differently from the point of view of networks, a holistic approach perceiving learning as the formation of networks inside, between and outside of individuals is required.
Connectivism, a learning theory by George Siemens (2005) aims to describe what it means to learn today in an environment where individuals recurringly exceed their mental capabilities through intense communication within digital networks.
The spirit of the age (Zeitgeist) can be described as a move from traditional mass media (the broadcast paradigm) to digital, interactive new media (the social media paradigm).
Various kinds of experiences, spectacles and effects of digital culture will dominate how we interpret reality and engage ourselves in various activities.
It should be noticed that in addition to being tools for communication and expression, media are also identity devices that affect the persona, world view and subjectivity of an individual.
Different kinds of extended experiences will irrevocably lead to the expansion of the sphere of media publicity and identity to touch areas that have been previously considered private. This can already be seen in the development of the social web as people start to record each others’ experiences, put them online and utilize the web as a platform to connect those experiences.
Big Brother, in this instance, is, well, us. (Arina & Inkinen 2007)
In a shifting environment like this we have to consider what it means to be an educational institution or a learner today.
Our educational system has successfully utilized the military- and outcome-based ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation) or SDI (Systematic Design of Instruction) models for decades, but it no longer matches the needs of the network society nor knowledge workers who work in complex and constantly shifting environments.
In fields where knowledge is ever-changing and the future is highly unpredictable, providing vessels with descriptions of the past is the wrong tool for the times.
The new era requires jedi-like skills for process-based network formation.
Serendipic Learning
Serendipic learning can be seen as learning that is not based on outcome, but rather on process.
There are no learning goals or curriculum to follow, no classrooms other than third places (Oldenburg 1999) the individual engages in, no sages on stage other than who the individual chooses to be the sages on the stage and no walls other than the blending boundaries of virtual communities.
Serendipity is about the accidental – or guided – encounters of individuals in complex systems, where the dance of interaction among the nodes is defining the outcome.
There is no central body orchestrating the interaction on the decentralized social web, but there are
many of such in the realms of education.
Serendipic learning is not even in a direct relationship with education, which derives from the Latin verb educere, meaning "to lead forth”, characterized by the presence of a more knowledgeable entity leading the learners.
This is far from such symbiotic organisms that need each other – and thus I must reflect – we need to recognize the learners ARE the hidden untapped potential within educational institutions for innovation and creativity.
Our schools have failed to change quickly enough from top-down knowledge broadcasts to bottom-up learning support facilities opening doors to new perceptions.
An important transformation is to move away from just-in-case learning to just-in-time learning by:
a) knowing how to seek different points of view rather than just knowing a specific answer,
b) learning to build on the work of others rather than next to it and
c) building social capital in addition to human capital.
Parasitic learners operate in a multi-dimensional polychronic (many things at once) learning ecosystem, instead of a sequentially linear monochronic (one thing at a time) learning environment.
http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2008/02/13/learning_zeitgeist_the_future_of.htm
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