Smallness – the next big thing!

Oh there is a buzz in the educational technology blogosphere that is music to my ears. D’Arcy is talking about it and so is James. The topic of discussion is smallness. Like D’Arcy, James and many others, I think small may be the next big thing in learning (at least in online learning).

D’Arcy raises some really good questions about how to create a learning system out of some small pieces loosely joined:

What are the small pieces? How can they be tied together? What is the larger ecology that forms as the pieces learn about each other? Where are the gaps and opportunities?

Why small? Because its not big. Its not a monolith. Its not the corporation. Its not all-consuming and impersonal. As James says:

I reckon that through weblogs and aggregation we can un-manage OLEs, we can, dare I say, incorporate subversion into our learning technologies and we can stop the rot of terrible student evaluations, frustrated and alienated teachers and encroaching managerialism into teaching and learning …

Preach on, brother! Devolve the managerial decisions to the users, and let the decisions be made at the edge instead of the (administrative) center. When the scale of the system is large enough, some intelligence and self-organization starts to emerge. How large of a loosely affiliated community is needed for this to happen, I wonder?

I remember a story from a workshop I went to many years ago in my university days. The presenter (name long since forgotten) was talking about campus ecology, specifically how many decisions were better made by watching student behaviour than trying to manage it. The example given was sidewalks. Anyone who has ever spent time on a university campus knows that the campus planners always put sidewalks in the wrong place, as evidenced by the numerous paths etched in the ground by generations of students. The presenter asserted that the best thing to do would be to wait 4 or 5 years after a campus is built before laying down sidewalks, then put the sidewalks where the students walk. It seemed like such an obvious idea to me at the time, and it seems even more obvious that education needs to move more towards the same kind of model.