Xyleme Learning Blog

When I was a kid, Mom explained to me that Elvis’ music and dance moves had once been considered scandalous.

Elvis!? Elvis impersonators officiate weddings. His music has joined that category of cultural artifact that’s now considered suitable for all ages. If he were performing on American Idol today, he would offend exactly none of the show’s faithful audience. For mainstream America, Elvis is establishment now.

Which is exactly how it should be in a culture that’s responsive to change.

Over the weekend, I was thinking about some of the posts I linked to in our last Learning Pulse, which took on various perspectives towards handling change. Also I played a video game with a friend, Civilization IV, where you take over one of the world’s civilizations and try to achieve technological, military and cultural superiority as compared to the rest of the world. Let’s hear it for multitasking. It gave me some ideas, and thank goodness.

So because the creators of Civilization have a fine sense of irony, two things happen when you discover the Internet: 1) you get for free any technology that two other societies have discovered and 2) your universities become obsolete.

Last year, I spoke to a journalism professor who would not have been amused. He wanted to know if bloggers, specifically political bloggers, would be willing to learn traditional journalism techniques. I told him that I thought so, and probably more readily if instructional materials were made available online. He responded that he’d much rather they went to a journalism school and studied there; he was working for a university, after all. I expect he’s going to be disappointed by how many of the ones that establish themselves independently end up going that route.

Wikipedia tells me that the first journalism school was founded in the 1860s. That was not when the first news and opinion publications got their start. Before that, anyone with a press could publish. And publish they did; a profusion of tracts, pamphlets, manifestos, propaganda sheets, small magazines with advertising, early newspapers, you name a type of publication and there was probably some equivalent back before there were schools to teach people how to make them ‘correctly’.

Correctly? How did anyone know how to publish before there was a formalized instructional design for teaching it? Well, they didn’t. Obviously. People tried a lot of things, most of them failed, often because they were terrible ideas, some of them worked very well or got very popular. Those things that got popular gradually became the establishment of publishing as we know it today, in all its forms.

And aren’t we glad that publishing, which had once been this erratic, frontier terrain, evolved to give us the many interesting journals, magazines, newspapers, novels, etc., that we enjoy today? It couldn’t have done that if there hadn’t been a larger cultural embrace of it, if it hadn’t become mainstream, establishment, even. We are wealthier, better informed, and better entertained because of it.

Just like we’re glad that Elvis is available to the masses. Who hasn’t caught themselves humming a few bars of “Hound Dog” now and again? That’s some catchy music.

But musicians didn’t stop with Elvis, just like he hadn’t stopped at jazz or gospel or R&B. Musicians at the bleeding edge of their art didn’t even stop with Nina Simone and Led Zeppelin. Which is great. And someday, future generations are going to be puzzled to hear that artists like Nine Inch Nails or the Black Eyed Peas, those old guys whose music their parents hum, shocked anyone.

A society that isn’t a constant give and take between the people who are ’so over’ their favorite band when they have more than a thousand fans and the people who only deal with bands whose fans number in the millions, that society will stagnate. It will be boring. It will get left behind, and richly deserve it. So to me, that means that this sort of argument (via):

There’s a couple reasons why I find the term useful, but the most important is that it captures the cultural revulsion many of us feel with the appropriation of the Learning 2.0 movement by corporations such as Blackboard. Learning 2.0, like punk, is a DIY movement. Like punk it favors technical accessibility over grand design.

And to people like us, Learning 2.0, if it is to remain relevant, must not be relegated to the dustbin of “features” or “products”. It’s neither a product or a process, but a way of approaching things, of which products are only one of the results.

… is a sign of progress. The first generation of corporate adaptations were bound to have detractors and make misfires, but they represent both an acknowledgment of the value of Learning 2.0 innovations and a future where they’re as ubiquitously available as Elvis and newspapers.

But corporations do need to adopt these technologies. They need to adapt to change or be left behind, and why not take the best innovations available to try doing that with? The incoming generation of employees don’t want to be parted from their 2.0 technologies, anyway.

The rapid transformation of politics, usually a late adapting field, will only accelerate these trends.

… “All the old institutions and players — big money, top-down parties, big-foot journalism, cloistered organizations — must adapt or face losing status and power. Personal Democracy, where everyone is a full participant, is coming.”

Back in 2004, these were seen as fringe ideas. Candidates for office and, just as importantly, the consultants who advised them, didn’t think the Internet mattered in politics. “Didn’t Howard Dean lose?” they would sneer. If you mentioned the word “blog” around Capitol Hill, people looked at you funny.

… [Now, ]we’ve lost count of all the national figures that have been affected by online activism. Millions of small donors, people giving less than $200 per donation, have flooded into the presidential campaign process. Far more people are making, watching and sharing online content — from blogs to videos — than are visiting the candidates’ own websites. And well more than half the electorate, especially the young, is relying on the Internet, rather than traditional news sources such as newspapers or TV, for political information. …

The established players in the recording industry, publishing industry, sales, marketing, politics, and education are all under extreme pressure to keep up with the rapid changes in this environment. Learning content management software companies would be silly to drag their feet, so their adaptation of 2.0 technologies is a sign of the health and responsiveness of the industry and their understanding that learners will expect these sorts of tools later and need to get used to them today.

It won’t be the end of innovation, either. The innovative edge will advance, and a few years from now we’ll all be talking about how best to anticipate and adapt to that environment.

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