LA days are so far away from today, nearly a generation as the crow flies. As a beginning teacher back in 1990, I needed to learn how to learn. By the time I left full time college in 1984, I believed strongly that I was done for good with school--no looking back. Yet, I found myself trapped in the whirl of the school I graduated from, working in a pyschiatric hospital to dull the pain of feeling like a failure. How many people thought that when they left college? How many people saw that school had let them down or worse, they had let school down. Yet, I loved school, or parts of it: the reading, the discussing, the camraderie.
The spiral of history means that learning happens over and over again. Some folks call it karma, but it's more like loop the loops in a rickety World War I bi-plane or circling the globe for months on end, over and over and over again on the space shuttle--sometimes the terrain is the same but often times it is different.
I've been speaking to my colleagues about this concept of open source learning communities. It's not necessarily up to us to create it, we believe. We are all a part of creating something new. That's where you, the reader, comes in.
Open Source Learning Communities, like open source computer code, means that you get to share ideas and change what works to suit your needs. Learning is it's own dialectic. Sometimes the swoop and concept of history even changes. For those of us who believe in Democracy, particularly the Democracy that is the Internet at this moment in history, our lives reflect bringing a sense of community to the public K-12 education space, with real people, who have real challenges. There is also an ideal, too. It's a priori and relative.
The Open Source Learning Community is not about exploiting people or making money or creating skilled workers for a better tomorrow. Rather, open source learning is about giving what we create away so that other people get to take advantage of what has been created. They in turn give away what they have created, and so on, and so on. The world then becomes a more transparent place with an ethos that counters the notion that people are broken and not fixable. At this point I'm not pointing to socities that have it down and can give us what we need if we study them well. I'm also not positing that the notion of Capitalism is bad. Listen carefully, we have solutions to fix the world's problems and we will need all of the tools at our disposal to heal them, even some of those things that created the so-called problem.
In future installments, we'll cover what works in education and what needs more time to be developed. Part of the mission is to weave in the loop of history that is memoir, storytelling, and parables to illucidate what can be.
Story tells truth always, in all ways.
