You are Never Alone

This afternoon, at the 2nd National Leading a Digital School Conference in Sydney, I attended a presentation by Dr. Glenn Finger of Griffith University titled Leading a Digital school - Imagination, Ideas and Inspiration: Roadmaps and Signposts.

Glenn is one of the authors whose work appears in leading a digital school: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE, which I reviewed about two weeks ago. In the final part of his talk Glenn referred to Wirearchy. He was talking about emerging digital signposts. Here are my notes:

Emerging signposts:

• Blended learning: techno choices for what best suits the needs: from the continuum from face 2 face to totally online: must improve learning and teaching.
  To call a school digital – need to assess what is missing.
• Wirearchy: recently emerged concept.
  We have to abandon ideas of hierarchy: need interconnected people and technology: communities of learning. See www.wirearchy.com
• Connectivism: most of our curriculum is based on constructivism: strong overlap with wirearchy. www.connectivism.ca
  Idea of connecting specialised nodes. The need to nurture and maintaining the connections. Implications for management and leadership.

I think wirearchy is what we are seeing emerge in current manifestations of social networking.
If for example, we look at edna Groups, they have to some extent a hierarchical structure. Each Group is “owned” - this is the Moodle model. Someone is responsible for the Group and how it works.
However the communities in me.edu.au are formed “on the fly” from the interests of the wider network of the members of me.edu.au. There are no owners, so no one is in charge of the community. There is no one whose word is worth more than anybody else’s in the community.

Here’s a definition to think about from the wirearchy site:

The working definition of Wirearchy is:
“a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”
It is clearly implied by the phenomenon of e-everything. Interconnected access to information, knowledge and instantaneous communications is the modern equivalent to the dynamics created by the invention of the printing press - information gets distributed (much) more widely.
Today’s rapid flows of information are like electronic grains of sand, eroding the pillars of rigid hierarchies. This new set of conditions is having real impact on organizational structures and on the ways we do things and behave.

Wirearchy is evident too in the read/write web where web 2.0 tools are enabling participants to publish (like this blog) or through Twittr or through wikis like WikiSpaces or even Wikipedia or WikiNews.
In some senses this is undermining the hierarchical nature of publishing. You no longer need to persuade a publisher that you have something useful to say - you simply self-publish online.

Outside of education for example, in the other part of my “wirearchy”, newspaper journalists who have traditionally reviewed books are complaining that book bloggers (like me) are undermining the authority of reviewers with journalistic training. They say we are contributing to the decline of demand for newspaper printed book reviews and ultimately to unemployment in their profession. Similarly as newspapers make scores, even hundreds, of their reporters/journalists redundant, the argument is that it is the online news sources who are contributing to the demise of the newspaper columns.

Wirearchy is certainly a concept worth thinking about.

Something to watch too - Glenn also used this in his presentation.