The developmental logic is this:

• (A) The communication infrastructure of the internet plus powerful end devices allows to have learning situations everywhere
• (B) The motivational factor of learning can be realized with social web logic (co-learning) plus personal tutoring via a learning platform

Result: Instead of sitting rather passively in front of a teacher in a lecture format there are now learning formats available, that are much more engaging and effective. And this is not a hymn to technocentric e-learning systems, but blended, life-long, hybrid, social, deep learning processes. A first haiku diagram about the new synergies waiting to substitute some inefficient institutionalized old school learning settings.

The upwards spiral of co-learning, co-creation and co-working

Connecting this with the betasalon yesterday: First, of course I do not restrict “coworking” to coworking spaces in the institutional form. But second they are great hubs for local change, breaking boudaries between working, learning, having fun, they are fine candidates for the new learning spaces we need.

We just heard Dale J. Stephens, founder of the UnCollege movement. He questions whether university is necessary to learning and personal development, and is challenging the high costs of college. Surprise for the skeptic: There is some statistical evidence that the absence of traditional school system is not the worst thing.

Hannes Kloepper, M.P.P. is cofounder of iversity, an academic collaboration platform and educational startup near Berlin.  Book upcoming in March 2012: Die Universität im 21. Jahrhundert

Dr. Stephan Breidenbach, founding Dean of Humboldt-Viadrina School of Governance, recognises the pressing need for universities to stay relevant, and is actively working on reforming the way in which knowledge is  created and shared at the university.

Debate / learnings

Now the debate has started and my first learning is that we have to be more radical in rethinking. We have to approach the “operating system” of the whole society and economy. Some basic concepts: The need of assessment and certification in a mobile world.

Question of power arises. It is about legitimation discourses and changing them. And if an institution is a system to stabilize itself how then can we have change in the instittuions? Can we (paradoxically) institutionalize transformation?

Hey, stop, an idea: Look for this in the economy (much more evolution power, mutation rate there than in the rest of society, you know Schumpeter …).

Update …. Companies, when the reach a certain size, usually create functional units for transformation (innovation department, R&D …) – or they even do open innovation, externalizing the innovation beyond the borders of the company.

Ideas from the debate now: Why not have cinemas for TED? Inspired for action.

Some video closely related to the discussion.
University 2.0 – Sebastian Thrun (DLD 2012)
http://new.livestream.com/dld/Track2Day2/videos/112950

Updated the image

Icon design: Anni Roolf, dezentrale.eu

How we work has radically changed during history. The social wave (with social technologies for networking, new concepts and mindsets to collaborate) has reached the working sphere for some years. E.g. there are 1.200 coworking spaces around the world now. And there is a new mindset in town with that mode of working.

Worldwide global-local event: #JELLYWEEK 2012

Today a global-local event starts to connect the growing community of coworkers. Up to now there are 206 jellies from 34 countries registered, some with even a program for the whole week. Never heard of “jellies”? Find more on the event website: #JELLYWEEK 2012 

Close observer and an active node

To come close to these new phenomena/movement as a researcher and to promote and foster transformation (I know well, that these are two different roles) I was very excited about the opportunity to be a part of organizing this open, self-governed and swarm-like event. Or less paradoxically: To create (hybrid/orbital?) spaces for communication and co-creation in the spirit of Open Space and Art of Hosting.

Challenge: Building a coordinative space for remote co-workers

It is a challenge to build a Social Information Architecture having no budget, no coder, no databse – and in the shortest time of some weeks. It resulted in decentral kind of swarm design (the swarm intelligence hype may be over – but  this concept is no fashion, but just a principle of construction). The structure is inspired by wiki thinking, but even more light, fragile, open and with a maximum of decentrality: A cloud of etherpads is having an essential role. Other “orbital” element: Google hangouts, e.g. permanent hangouts.

We are curious, whether this will work … yep, pioneering comes with risk of total failure …. “We”, that is Anni Roolf from Wuppertal and I as the core team. Anni is the initiator and founder of the worldwide #JELLYWEEK 2012. I am very grateful for the opportunity to create something new with her as a passionate and  smart person. And we only met once and did completely remote collaboration with using, google docs, facebook, skype etc., a tiny dose of project management  of basecamphq.com – and plain phone calls are still in use too. To get a bit of the spirit, here is a short message from a New Zealand space.

Update 2012-02-07-A:

The #JELLYWEEK 2012 was a great success

… and it was a huge experience and learning space to understand the phenomena, dynamics and the advantages of the diverse “connection and collaboration tools”. I will report on the learnings in a future blog post. For now I want to complete the post above with a link to the (quick and dirty) introduction video, an introduction into  the light-weight “social information architecture” for the decentral global-local event.

Screencast ”Introduction  to the ”social information architecture” #JELLYWEEK 2012  (screencast.com)  

Update 2012-02-07-B:

Adding the map picture.

"Seeing Red: Millennials Are Cooler With Socialism Than Capitalism" (good.is)

US millennials dreaming of socialist utopia (bad news)

“According to a new study conducted by the Pew Research Center, 49 percent of Obama’s biggest fans—Millennials age 18 to 29—view socialism in a favorable light, compared to 43 percent who view it unfavorably.” …

“It’s not hard to figure out why our generation isn’t so gung-ho about capitalism—it has disappointed and, in some cases, straight-up failed us.”
www.good.is/post/seeing-red-millennials-are-cooler-with-socialism-than-capitalism/

Beyond 19th century ideologies (good news)

The free, connection-empowered, empathic individual – with self-responsibility and social responsibility

The mythology for decades has been: “Capitalism is best – for all and for all the world”. This mythology is still crumbling rapidly as the multiple crisis are not really solved. The fatal global ecological crisis is even in the shadow of the global ecological crisis. Worse: If world economy is “back on track” this means more destruction of the planet, as long as we have future-blind growth politics instead of economics following the social and ecological rationality, a system with inbuilt “sustainability and wellbeing loops” instead of the now dominating “short profit loops”.

In reaction to this destruction of faith the old collectivist “(blood) red” mythologies raise their head again. Neosocialist collectivist systems would be an awfully bad alternative. But: The ubiquitous internet connectivity holds a disruptive potential to redesign the political economy in a quite different manner than the ideological camps of the 19th century – capitalism and socialism – could ever conceive of. And: Smart green technologies are maturing and pave the way to a viable post-fossil society.

A genuine new system, with the co-existence of individual freedom, mass-collaboration and new “headless” value streams (eventually with nearly no banks and bosses) might be a possibility to develop. We have reasons for optimism. If anyone is locked into false alternatives – liberate!

2012: From protest to process

2011 has seen the Arab Spring and the global Occupy Movement. Maybe it is time to progress from protest to process and from process to production, new answers for the challenges ahead.  I want to invite you to an opportunity to find companion and exchange in the diversity of the “social wave”. In the last years coworking places around the world have emerged as new spaces to probe new forms to work and collaborate.

Coworking – and beyond coworking

Coworking is a style of work which involves a shared working environment, sometimes an office, yet independent activity. Unlike in a typical office environment, those coworking are usually not employed by the same organization. Wikipedia - Today we find a growing number of cowo places around the world (May 2011: 820). For more: Global Coworking Survey (deskmag).

Coworking means not just to have a new kind of work place, but it is part of a different work culture, it is connected with the “spirit of co“, communication, connectedness, collaboration.

JellyWeek January 16 to 22 2012

“Let’s discover the sense of global coworking in the upcoming WORLDWIDE #JELLYWEEK 2012. Which important needs can be fulfilled by coworking? For which local and global problems coworking can be a part of the solution? How can coworkers use the global coworking infrastructure to foster their businesses and projects?” jellyweek.tumblr.com

This is a great opportunity to show your project and to connect with likeminded people, exchange ideas, find advice.

Never visited a coworking space? Bring your project and ideas into that orbital community around the planet! Keep upated with JellyWeek on facebook.com. Are you a  coworking space and want to connect? Get on the map!

The mood to occupy

In my perspective the Arab spring and the “political occupying” of public
places – like the Tahir Square – is probably the precondition of that, what then was called the world wide “occupy movement”. What is the mood of the people doing that, however specific their context (as in Egypt, Greece or in US)? “Enough is enough!” and “Despite we might have not the solution to the problems, as a first step we say ‘No’”. This is my subjective verdict. And I have to to stress, how subjective this stance has to be, since the pheonomenon is very diverse and complex. And I have read and seen much, but only a subset of the media deluge. So I am trying to be careful, since I have only watched the movement from a distance, more an ethnographer than a participant.

One of the countless serious man thinking about

Robert Steele: An Open Letter to Occupy

You can read the text here: Public Intelligence Blog www.phibetaiota.net/2011/11/robert-steele-an-open-letter-to-the-occupy-mob/

DOCUMENTATION

History in the making: Occupy movement - Wikipedia 

“The Occupy movement is an international protest movement which is primarily directed against economic and social inequality.^[6][7] The movement started in Kuala Lumpur on July 30, 2011, with Occupy Dataran,^[8][9] followed by New York City and San Francisco on September 17, 2011, with Occupy Wall Street and Occupy San Francisco. By October 9 Occupy protests had taken place or were ongoing in over 95 cities across 82 countries and over 600 communities in the United States. …
…

On May 30, 2011, a leader in the Spanish Indignants movement, inspired by the Arab Spring, made a call for a worldwide protest on October 15. …”
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement - 2011-11-16)

(And as you can read in the growing timeline):

• June 9, 2011 – a Canadian anti-consumerist magazine called Adbusters registered the domain name occupywallstreet.org
• July 13  – Adbusters made the initial proposal for a peaceful demonstration to occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street

Jón Þór says, that in the context of arab spring etc. the observation is: Facebook  makes possible that everybody knows, that everybody knows, that everybody is discontent. Great! Some points come to mind:

a) power history as media history

• The printing press brought an explosion in the delivery of knowledge – with literacy as a condition.
• The blogs and wikis brought an explosion in the delivery of more fine-grained knowledge plus opinion, i.e. evaluative communication
• Social network activity streams deliver even more finegrained information (including noise). This socially granular informations are implicitely or explicitely evaluative. They can be conceived as implicitely political, insofar as politics is the engagement with the res publica, i.e. shared spaces, practices, social objects. QED

b) Technological connectivity results in the emergence of political connectivity

And this makes Jón Þór’s statement so dramatic – the technological connectivity induces a first order emergent property – social connectivity; the latter then induces political connectivity (aka tele(em)pathy, if you like).

So the transparancy tools make the political buildings and machinations transparent, WikiLeaks or not … The Emperor’s new clothes … This is the catalyst of change we see day by day now.

Social Capital World Forum 2011 

“The term social capital is still not widely understood outside of academic or political circles, however there are many organisations delivering social, economic and environmental benefit as an outcome of their work, without using the term. The SCWF believes that greater knowledge of social capital, the terminology and the structures, can help demonstrate the value of such work and facilitate progress in our communities socially, environmentally and economically to bring about a more sustainable and prosperous society.”

SCWF 2011 in Dornbirn/Austria

The 3rd Social Capital World Forum took place on 23-24 September 2011 in Dornbirn, Austria. The event has been organised by Assist Social Capital, Buro fur Zukunkftsfragen and the University of Applied Science in Dornbirn, in collaboration with the Austrian Government’s Department for Life and Evangelisches Tagungs- und Studienzentrum in Boldern, Switzerland.

Insights

It was great to meet these great folks from different countries with very specific perspectives and multi-disciplinary insights. I realized that Social Capital  has to be a central aspect in the “social wave  observatory” of social foresight. Think about e.g. the riots in London in this year to understand the destructive power of negative Social Capital. And understand the role of trust and relation building in the Arab spring dynamics resulting in political transformation. The interesting question is to understand the complex dynamics of Social Capital in different contexts and settings. How to wisely create, modulate, “curate” or gardening it.

Drawing about process analogies emerging during a workshop. Neologism: "pracademics" - between practitioners and academics

Social Capital World Forum  at Facebook

Foresight Thinking. Source: http://dthsg.com/3rd-partnerworkshop-foresight-thinking/

It was great pleasure to attend the BETTER BETA | Design Thinking @ HSG in Lüneburg (some time ago, yes). I learned to know new people, passions and methods. Have to add an update later, for now only the hint to the fusion of design thinking and foresight in the Foresight Thinking approach. This method is very important for the social foresight toolbox I want to build here step by step.

More: http://foresight.stanford.edu/methods.html

Foresight thinkers In action at BetterBeta, adjusting a biography of a persona. Source: Willi Schroll

Program of BetterBeta: http://www.slideshare.net/sniggy/better-beta-11