Emergent Learning
Kathleen Gilroy,
eLearn Magazine,
Feb 10, 2004
I would normally simply pass on this item instead of hacking eLearn Magazine's URL to give you the bulk of the article (the first paragraph, a throwaway, is temporarily on the magazine's home page), but it was plugged on DEOS and is sufficiently misleading as to warrant a correction. The author writes, loosely, about social software, Howard Dean's campaign, and the concept of emergence, getting most of it wrong. For example, the concept of emergence, discussed throughout the article, is not the drawing of "power from the grassroots." Nor was the term 'emergence' (or 'emergant') coined by Steven Johnson in 2001; it has been around for decades. And though Johnson may say, “Dean is a system running for President," most of the discussion in the social software community lately has been to show that Dean was anything but. Asks Dave Winer, "But did Howard Dean know what a blog was? No. Does he know what one is today? No! Did he ever have a blog? He didn't." Winer sums it up nicely: " The Dean campaign taught us that you can't use the Internet to launch into a successful television campaign to win primaries." If you want to read a good analysis of the Dean campaign and social software, Clay Shirkey's is the best I've seen online. And should the author wish to do some serious research on emergence, this would be a good place to start.
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