Main Area
Lift the Scales From My Eyes
Posted on February 3rd, 2013
What am I walking away from all this video and text that I consumed this morning in the #edcmooc Week 2 resources? If we are going to fix things in this world, we need to be able to communicate and learn outside our social network. Our learning and interactions needs to extend outside our Personal Leaning Community (PLC). Otherwise we are forcing our learning to be “in-bred”. In order to be able to communicate outside our circle of friends we need to be able to communicate with a common knowledge base.
Why is a common knowledge base important? When we use metaphors, we are using them to communicate ideas. Unfortunately, people need to have the common experience in order to understand what the metaphors are saying. This brings to mind Ed Hirsch’s book Cultural Literacy < link > where he lists a set of ideas and things that everyone should know. This really flies in the face of personalized learning where students only study what they are interested in.
How is this related to another idea brought to mind by this week’s reading and video is the idea of how effective is social networking. We can interact and collaborate with like-minded people using social media. These people will most likely have the same reference base as we do so they will understand the metaphors. SO I guess as long as we are content with communicating with like-minded people, then we only need to have a localized cultural base.