Rethinking the virtual

I was at a small conference last week which was organized by the Faculty's research priority area: Educational futures & Innovation. Nick Burbules who is visiting for a few months spoke at the conference and there was an interesting and diverse bunch of folk from education and related fields.

The one point of interesting debate was the question of what Jaron Lanier calls "online fetish site for foolish collectivism", i.e. the rise of forms of knowledge online (e.g. Wikipedia) that are different from the usual, authoritative forms of knowledge.

To me, some of the reactions were a little silly. More or less along the lines of "how dare they". That is being a little glib but, to me, that was the gist of it. When these kinds of shifts occur, I think it is silly and dangerous to simply try and dismiss them via conventional appeals to authority. I mean, that is the very point. The "foolish collectivism" that Lanier refers to may be foolish but it is being used increasingly by large number of folk. Rather than bellowing at the phenomenon it may be worth taking a much closer look at what is going on in terms of knowledge. Here the work of David Weinberger is more nuanced and considered than the what I have read thus far from the neo-epistemologists.

This blog has been left ...inactive for way too long. Maybe some more scribbling might happen.