Over the last couple of days, several items have surfaced in my social feeds about how the Internet doesn’t work and what to do about that. First came Ethan Zuckerman’s description of advertising as “the Internet’s original sin.” which was inspired to some degree by Maciek Ceglowski’s The Internet with a Human Face. Today Mike Caulfield wrote about link rot and data impermanence.
Common to Caulfield’s and Ceglowski’s critiques is the notion of decentralization as a way forward. Taking Mike’s concepts of federated note taking as a point of departure, I’m thinking a lot about what that sort of decentralization might look like in education. What sort of tool set does the digital learner need? I think of two things:
- A notebook/research space – somewhere to collect thoughts, ideas, sources, and evidence and connect them together. One should be able to keep things private, make them public, or in between.
- A portfolio – A place to present finished artifacts for evaluation by teachers, admission committees, potential employers, etc.
Smallest Federated Wiki + page level access controls + paragraph level attribution would do a bang-up job at #1. WordPress or perhaps something like Mahara is well-suited to #2. Is it desirable/necessary that they interoperate? (so that items in your portfolio would come with attribution chains already attached) What else does is a must have for the modern digital learner?
