DJALCHEMI

Round-up of recent writing in other places

Agile learning: How 'making do' can evolve into 'making good' is my latest attempt at developing and honing what I mean by agile learning and why it's important. Written for the newsletter of the Association for Learning Technology, it's aimed at the ALT constituency which is mostly people in Higher and Further Education along with a scattering of commercial learning tech companies — and, at just over 2,000 words, it's reasonably long. One of the ideas I use as props is the learning ecosystem. Since I wrote this, Adam Curtis's TV essay picking apart the ecosystem metaphor has been broadcast in the UK. I like having my premises challenged, sometimes, and hope to explore this in a forthcoming post.

Also for ALT I contributed a short presentation to the Making the Most of Informal Learning webinar. You can watch and listen to the full recording: best experienced from the beginning (which, oddly, starts at 1 hour 9 mins on the clock) with Jane Hart and Charles Jennings presenting before me, then I come on when the clock says 1 hour 40 mins. You can also download my slides, though they make little sense without the accompanying ramblings.

I'm one of the friends of New Public Thinking, another of Dougald Hine's many interventions into learning and intellectual culture. My contribution so far is called When Should We Eat Our Brains? It's a sceptical look at the idea that getting a bunch of clever people to "co-create" is the answer to any and every problem.

The open source movement has got us into the habit of believing that "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow". But lots of the problems we face are very different from debugging software. Solving them is more like unpicking knots. The more hands and eyes you devote to unpicking a knot, all at once, the tighter the knot gets.

This piece is a kind of companion to another I wrote last year for The Future We Deserve book, which, frustratingly, has yet to be published. You can see what I submitted, which pulls the lens even further back to ask whether we have what it takes to husband the planet, comparing the prognoses of Stuart Brand and James Lovelock.

On a completely different note, here's my review of a Trembling Bells gig in Lewisham.

Finally, I'm blogging more frequently (though erratically as ever) on the Agile Learning amplify site, plus occasionally on the Everything Unplugged group site.

Bumble bee photo by tassie.sim, licensed under Creative Commons.