After 20 years of working with schools from all sorts of angles, all of them national in scale and focused on connecting people, I truly believe that the true improvement of education comes from within the classrooms and schools themselves. I don't believe that reform efforts shaped by legislation or regulation or even externally funded networks of research reform are going to make long-term change. So the thinking around how change happens and how the Internet helps is really of interest to me. Tying that to educational change is the focus of my dissertation work.
I first heard about the concepts from Doug Engelbart, a founding presence on the 'Net.
Howard Rheingold presents some relevant ideas in his concept of Smart Mobs.
And Seth Godin comes at it from the angle of marketing and how it is changing in the 'Net-based world through connecting Tribes.
I know that I want to pursue this in education, both studying it and making it happen. What I need to figure out is what small piece of it I want to write about for my dissertation so that I can get that done and move onto the bigger work.
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