One possible objection to the idea I’ve been discussing here is that it’s nothing new – that it just takes some things which are already happening, adds a few more, and gives the whole lot a name.

I think that there’s more to it than that, though.  Much more.

Firstly, the idea – as those who’ve been thinking about it know – involves a large group of people in a collective learning project, exploiting the web to draw their experiences, what they learn, what they want to know and, crucially, the people themselves together in one virtual space.  (Lots of people will also meet in the real world of course – it’s vital to remember that the web is just a tool, not an end in itself.)

They will learn by exploring.  They already have many of the tools they need to do that.  Most signficantly, of course, they each have an amazingly capable, astonishing, most-complex-object-in-the-universe 100 billion neuron Human brain.  But we shall add to the mental tool-set they need to be good explorers and we’ll also give them some physical tools (cameras, sub-laptop computers and so on) they need to explore.

So those who participate will learn a lot both about the topics we’re going to explore and also about learning itself. In particular they’ll improve their ability to formulate good questions, distinguish good answers from bad, how to deal with information that makes them uncomfortable and so on.

I said ‘collective learning’ above because, if this works, this large group of students, staff, parents and others are going to learn together as a group so there will be, I hope, be a lot of learning both within and between generations (not to mention cultures).  ‘Inter-generational learning’ is a topic dear to the heart of this rather lovely man I got to know working on a project in a near byy town.  Peter’ specialism is continuing education and he spends much of his life flying around the world providing advice and helping to build projects – must give him a call about this project if we get the green light today!

I hope our large group of learners will also learn a lot about each other – that’s what the community building aspect of this is all about. People will get to know each other better – for me, that was one of the best things about the Corn Exchange event.

They will also learn about how to develop and implement ideas, because a central feature of the project would involve equipping those who take part with the skills and ability to improve the project itself. Or to be more precise ‘the system’ – the thing which glues all this activity together – itself. And lastly, as Eliot says in far more elegant words I’ve quoted below, they will also learn a lot about where they live.

By weaving together potentially disparate activities and a large group of people spread over two continents into a complete and ever-evolving whole – a ‘complex adaptive system‘, to use some systems jargon – the project has the potential to achieve, to use that much abused word, some real synergy. The whole could, potentially, be much more than the sum of the parts.

As the first line of the wikipedia article that last link points to puts it: complex adaptive systems are ‘complex, in that they are diverse and made up of multiple interconnected elements and adaptive in that they have the capacity to change and learn from experience.’

TS Eliot would have put it rather more elegantly, no doubt.  Here’s the quote I promised.

‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’

Appropriate, isn’t it?

I stumbled on this helpful advice on the WordPress FAQ site yesterday which prompted the thought that, when I’m able to explain what ‘the idea’ that the posts over the last three days have been about actually is, I’ll start a blog specifically about the idea based on the structure it suggests.  I’ll continue posting here as well, no because I’m sufficiently vain to suppose that anyone out there is reading this stuff but because – as I explained in an earlier post – writing about my thoughts helps me to organise and develop them.  There’s a danger, of course, that I’ll have my very own equivalent of the ‘blog event horizon’ I mentioned earlier and end up spending all my time blogging.  Not really a danger – I type very quickly which is one reason that most of my posts are too long.

Talking of Douglas Adams, one of my to-dos for today is to start work on an emergency plan I’ve been asked to write for a nearby town. I am sorely tempted to follow Adams’ lead and write, in very large print on a side of A4, ‘Don’t Panic!’ and send it in with my invoice.  (If you haven’t read the Hitchiker’s Guide, google around and you’ll find out why.)

What I meant to say when I started the ramble below was that ‘the idea’ has many interesting systemsy features.  As I’ve mentioned before, I’m very interested in systems thinking.  It’s simply a way of thinking about the world which takes account of connectedness.  Like other thinking ‘tools’ it helps us to understand things better. We have to separate the world into different parts – subjects at school, for example – to help us understand complexity.  But as Peter Senge said in the opening paragraph of ‘The Fifth Discipline‘ – if you only read one book about organisations and management, that should be it, in my view:

“From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This makes apparently complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price.  We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole.”  The Fifth Discipline is about 5 things that organisations need to be good at to be effective ‘learning organisations’ – the fifth is systems thinking.

Returning to ‘the idea’, at present, I feel as though I’m standing at the centre of a web which has connections spreading out in all directions.  There are connections related to people. Lots of people I know, know about things which can help to make the idea work.  There are also connections related to ideas – things I’ve learnt about over the years: systems theory itself, how organisations work, psychology and managing change, innovation, and so on.  They are all helping to make sense of and develop the idea.  Lastly, there are connections within the idea itself.

As anyone who has read this will know, I don’t like jargon.  I largely think in terms of Whats and Hows when I’m trying to understand things.  I ask myself questions like ‘Is this a good how for that what?’  and ‘What could this be a how of?’  or think things like ‘Interesting how, but I think they’ve completely forgotten what the what is?’  (I don’t say much of this out loud, for obvious reasons, and have been known to use words like ‘strategy’ and ‘goal’ in ordinary conversation, even when I’m thinkng What.)

I explain more about whats and how in this presentation which is included on a CD, with some others, in the Mindworks Box.  (Did I mention that I’m very happy to swap these boxes for some of your money?)

Because ‘the idea’ involves a very high level what – it’s essentially about involving a large group of people in some collective learning about a very large subject – there are, literally, hundreds of hows.  The presentation I linked to above mentions the obvious point that a ‘how’ at one level is a ‘what’ for the next level down.  Each what can often have many hows.  Simple, isn’t it?