The wisteria over my front gate is in full bloom, our plum trees are covered with purple pom-poms, the pear tree in back is snowy white with blossoms, and my allergic reaction is so bad that I can hardly think straight. With my immune system compromised and my defenses down, last night I tottered on the edge of the bottomless pit of raw, seething information that is the web.
Lock me in solitary with a fast connection to the net, and I’d get lost in the feeds, photos, avatars, links, and thoughts for days. Last night I went online to write a few pages of the Informal Learning 2.0 Fieldbook. Soon I had a dozen tabs open on Firefox: a list of corporate social media evangelists, Nature magazine (archives back to 1869!), a great presentation by the late Hal Riney, the infamous Dutch anti-Koran movie, Scoble, Jason Kotte, the Smart Car (decided to give it a test drive today), the motorcycle concourses d’elegance (bought tickets), a series of papers on web-based learning I wrote in 1999, photographs of Cozumel, Dave Gray’s new blog, the Story of Stuff, Elliott Masie’s new ning community (Learning Town), and a gallery of sock puppets.
Like the pioneering Whole Earth Catalog, the Informal Learning 2.0 Fieldbook will function as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting. As generous “users” would said when the Catalog came out in the sixties, we’d love to turn you on. We aim to produce a diverse, visually compelling, perusable, continually-updated, pragmatic idea book.
Unlike the Whole Earth Catalog, this un-book lists things that are readily available via the web. The Catalog described everything from cookbooks to solar heaters, Swiss Army knives to first aid, and geodesic domes to shovels. The Informal Learning 2.0 Fieldbook is more likely to dwell on enterprise 2.0, communities of practice, stealth learning, appreciative inquiry, and social networks.
I’m conceptualizing the UI for the Informal Learning 2.0 Fieldbook as I go. I suspect it will include a printed guidebook and commentary, and take-all-you-want components on the web. The whole deal will consist of “small pieces, loosely joined.” Participants (what I call the people once known as readers) can dive in via tags and connections. Alternatively, they may begin with thought leaders’ overviews, perspectives, and pointers.
Bottom-up or top-down? Have it your way.
More to come. Suggestions welcome.
And I’m going to head over to the beach to find out if sea breezes can appease my allergies.
Ah-choo.
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