IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Learning 153
rapid, mass, large-scale learning, too. J. C. Herz’s investigations of the online
gaming world reveal numerous examples of networks in which professionals—particularly
those involved in fast-evolving technical domains—
share information and experience. As Howard Rheingold confirms so
cogently in Smart Mobs, we don’t have to reinvent the concept of collaboration:
It’s in our nature as humans to collaborate, and this existing social
characteristic is being amplified and accelerated by new communication
tools ranging from data mining and ratings software to wireless devices. 50
A well-known example is Slashdot, 51 a website for technology news and
discussion. Unlike that of a traditional technical journal, in which a small
team of specialist writers roam the world’s trade fairs and labs and then
write articles about technology, the editorial content of Slashdot is created
by its users. Any Slashdotter can submit a text or comment on one
already there. Submissions to Slashdot are filtered and rated by moderators.
Despite the craze for ‘‘social software’’ and the growth of websites such
as LinkedIn and Orkut that promise to revolutionize our social and profesional
lives, the Internet does not own mass collaboration. In all forms
of learning, the best collaboration involves live contact, and this, too, can
be designed. To give just one example, ‘‘OroOro’’ was a three-day event
organized by Caroline Nevejan, research director of the Amsterdam University
of Professional Education, with its twenty-two thousand students and
more than one thousand teachers. Nevejan was looking for ways to support
collaboration among teachers fatigued by years of forced continuous
reorganization and by a government intent on pushing more and more
students through the system. Many of the university’s teachers were being
confronted by students who knew more about the technical details
of their subject—for example, Java programming—than the teachers did.
It was a recipe for demoralization. ‘‘My job was not to bring in yet more
technology—we already had that,’’ Nevejan told me at the time, ‘‘but to
design processes that would enable our teachers and students to make
better use of new tools.’’ The aim of ‘‘OroOro’’ was to accelerate this new
approach. Part symposium, part hands-on workshop, it enabled 1,000
teachers to explore together new ways to organize relationships between
what—and who—we know. 52
The lesson of projects like ‘‘OroOro’’ is that communities of practice
can be designed—in this case, within a single institution—and they are
not principally about technology. Communities of practice are defined by