UrBlog

We step directly into ongoing discourse, and must somehow get our bearings. But why not begin with this bit from today's blogstream?
D'Arcy Norman has a posting Thoughts on Stephen Downes’ ITI Keynote and this morning Boing Boing informed me that it had a reference (a link-to and comment on it had been made in another blog) by Just Another Ant (stigmergic wanderings):

I'm sensing a bit of a movement away from the paradigm of large repositories of static learning objects towards an approach to online learning that embraces spontaneous activity of learners and learning communities. D'Arcy and Stephen both mention Brian Lamb and Alan Levine's paradigm of Fast, Cheap and Out of Control as an effective way of organizing online learning in actual practice.

So I went to FC&OoC and started looking around. I think I'm a Fence Sitter ("...the choice between "centralized" and "distributed" methods is a false one. For one, it is clear that both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. For another, there is no "universal user"... different people respond differently to online environments. Finally, the worlds are converging... it won't be long until "central applications" support the tools and protocols such as weblogs, wikis and RSS -- it's already happening -- and at the same time distributed tools are evolving to interact with each other in increasingly structured ways."). I sense a karass at work, to which I probably belong.
The point here: I'm able to include myself in a conversation, if only as a listener/lurker, and in fact it turns out to be a Conversation, loosely joined... My immediate problem is how to help my students and colleagues to the essentials of this process without getting bogged in details.