Until educators see the difference between human learning networks and knowledge networks the internet’s biggest gift to education will continue to be missed. Sure, it is great for students to network among each other in their lessons. But forget that for a bit and look here at something else.
In the illustration above some to of the relationships of historical events and factors are linked in a network. You are not looking at something a textbook can do: what you see takes an open network to form the relationships and emergent patterns! Until the 21st century no such medium for studying knowledge existed. Now look at what has happened:
- Everything known by humankind is embedded in the open internet!!
- The internet is an unlimited network of nodes that can be linked by relationships, right or wrong.
- Spontaneously — through use by knowledgeable people — the best patterns of links emerge so everybody can find them (the core idea of Google).
No one even knew these kinds of networks existed until 1998 when they were discovered. For the past decade, network science has become a major factor in many other sciences. Biology is a prime example. The American Revolution image above was adapted from the cover of the current issue of the Journal of Cell Research.
So where are the educators? Mostly they are chopping up subject knowledge into grades and standards, and printing them in textbooks . When they talk about education networks it is in terms of people — not how nodes of knowledge relate to explain The Shot Heard Around the World. Educators are long overdue in using the natural network ability to organize, vet, and emerge human knowledge.
RESPONSE TO COMMENT ONE: Only stuff like some living molecules and human knowledge — stuff that is inherently, structurally a network — will form patterns in an open network matrix as we now have in the internet. Pedagogy, for example, is seldom network compatible. The stunning surprise education has missed so far is how what we know and teach is, itself, a network. But then, that makes sense when you think about it: what we know is the product of the human mind, which is a network too. Human knowledge — like relationships in the American Revolution — learned by the mind from the internet is a matter of mirroring between two networks. Gorgeous!