IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

146 Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
Time-lines. From Caroline Nevejan, Synchroon|Asynchroon: Ondwerwijsvernieuwing in
de informatiesamenleving (Synchronous|Asynchronous: Educational Renewal in the
Information Society) (Amsterdam: Hogeschool van Amsterdam, 2003), 40–41.
navigate the online/offline, synchronous/asynchronous modes of study
that their course will in the future entail.
Design Principle 2: Place and Space
The concept of a ‘‘death of distance’’ made great headlines when Internet
rhetoric was at its height. Its grandchild is the concept of ‘‘anytime, anywhere
learning.’’ This idea sounds attractive and uncontroversial—until
one realizes that it describes a point-to-mass distribution model of learning
that overlooks the significance of place and the localization of knowledge.
Learning depends on place, time, and context. An exclusive focus on
schools and colleges as sites of learning and the distribute-then-learn model
of e-learning both fail to exploit these more complex geographies of learning.
As Seely Brown and Duguid emphasize in The Social Life of Information,
a lot of what we learn is remarkably local: history, agriculture, politics, art,