Stolen but unfinished

Prodded by Maish's eLearningpost, this evening I re-read John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's wonderful article, Stolen Knowledge. More than ten years old now, yet people are still absorbing the message. I gained new insights from my return visit.
... the best way to support learning is from the demand side rather than the supply side. That is, rather than deciding ahead of time what a learner needs to know and making this explicitly available to the exclusion of everything else, designers and instructors need to make available as much as possible of the whole rich web of practice-explicit and implicit-allowing the learner to call upon aspects of practice, latent in the periphery, as they are needed.

The "Work in Progress" label atop this classic is wonderful. It's so honest. Nothing is ever anything but a work in progress, is it? Only religions and cranks lay claim to ultimate truth. A work in progress allows the reader to engage the content, knowing that he or she has the opportunity to take the work further. That's what engagement is all about.


Posted by Jay Cross at November 20, 2003 11:27 PM | TrackBack