Learning Networks

Going to basics. Each person hears and sees marks around and assigns meaning. This meaning is collective. Eventually consciousness arises, as a social process. We grow in learning networks. After developing basic motor coordination up to the point of walking when we are babies. Speech and literacy come in time, then we are ready for school.


Preschool networks of learning stay with us until we die. Our cohort invents ways to talk and act, unique to our crowd. I remember my sisters talking in funny ways they could only understand. Mannerism, accents, gestures; a universe of communicative skills. Finally then we enter school. depending on the region it could be a room with one adult and a bunch of kids taking all the subject matter of six years of study in the same room. It could be an instructor and a TV set provided by the state. Nowadays it could be an Internet connected netbook. Maybe drawing energy by photocells from the sun.

We get to the level I am most interested in, because I teach in a university.

These eighteen year olds, are handsome and curious, they look like flowers to those of us much older than them. They come to us eager to learn, and mainly to become professional workers in our society. We have quizzes, tests, and presentations galore, mainly by the old professors, but more and more, the young ones are invited to lead the class. They prepare and discuss among themselves, with the instructor as some kind of a coach.

Enter the Internet.

The collaborations are leaving classrooms and becoming networks of knowledge. Theories are being made as I write this. See the Wikipedia article on Connectionism. Translation, text to speech, html, $\LaTeX$, and other tools are exploding.

I believe this explosion has a reason. Humans have reached a state of no return. Utopia or Oblivion, as that great American thinker, Bucky,  wrote many years ago now.