In his book, Shirky describes a "ladder of activities that are enabled or improved by social tools" in which "The rungs on the ladder, in order of difficulty, are sharing, cooperation, and collective action." (Here Comes Everybody, p.49).
While I am sure Shirky never intended for anyone to use these steps as a planning tool for scaling lessons and helping students own their own learning and build their own networks, I do think the four verbs work nicely for 21st Centuryizing (if you will) what we could be doing in the classroom.
I suggest that these constructs should be used, if used at all, as a scaffolding or spiraling framework. Online we can be sharing-connecting & collaborating at the same time and at different levels.
Basically, my current thinking is you can take any of the current 21st Century skills lists-- for example Wagner's "7 Survival Skills" or Linda Darling Hammond's "Changing Expectations for Learning" and you still get individuals publishing and sharing at best.
The ideas I am playing with now take the highest level of the new Bloom's Create and move it out from there to community. Living in a participatory culture (Jenkins, 2007) suggests that we need to move from a traditional classroom framework to a community framework and that in doing so the focus moves from the individual creating and publishing to the community collaborating and taking action.
It isn't enough for my colleagues or my students to be engaged and sharing with each other in the isolation of the classroom. Instead we need to understand how to publish our work and ideas to an authentic audience (teachers first and then model, once they own it, for students).
But it shouldn't stop there- because once we share our thinking online, others will find it and begin to connect to us via the medium. And from those connections we will find others with passionate interests similar to ours. We will begin to build a professional network of learners. And from that network we may decide to collaborate around a shared interest or passion as a means to learn and grow. And who knows-- from there we may find a project that will address the common good and bring even more caring individuals into a situated learning community which is starting to develop around our shared interest.
What I am trying to do is find a way teachers and students can think about/explore their passions and take them beyond the walls of a classroom to the community. A place where kids can learn what they need, when they need to learn it- rather than learning according to some artificial curriculum plan (Papert, 2004). And from those connections begin to understand how to build and leverage the potential of their PLNs and CoPs in ways that will take them through life.
Currently, I am trying to place these ideas in a grounded context while at the same time conducting some action research to see how they play out as a planning tool for teachers in "21st Centuryizing" their instruction.