The Corporation is a very interesting documentary that details the nature of corporations, and corporate control. I’ve made a clip of a funny but fascinating anecdote, with SceneMaker.net of a chapter from the Youtube video playlist.
“Voices from the New American Schoolhouse explores life outside the usual educational box. Narrated exclusively by students, the film chronicles life and learning at the Fairhaven School in Upper Marlboro, MD which practices an undiluted form of freedom and democracy that turns mainstream education theory on its head. “
But does it scale?
I’ve been thinking about education and democracy a lot recently.
The Global Mindshift / Integral Era guys propose that what makes humans special, and separate from other animals is that they have a far wider breadth of learning and play, as mammals that stay at a period of play and learning far longer than others, reaping the rewards of more informed cognitive intelligence development and so on.
My friend Lion Kimbro, has been working on a democratic school style gathering for adults, and is doing it in the meatspace since it isn’t currently feasible to telenetwork (or similar), on the same emotional level.
What makes embeddable flash video players special is that it’s the most efficient route for effectively conveying content emotionally to a wide audience. The shortest distance from a mind to the minds of others, requires the use of Flash video, right now. People are far more willing to click play on an embedded movie than right-click an mpeg file. As a result, the most potent medium is currently video, in terms of the bandwidth of communication conveyed and ease of deployment.
In the same way, Lion Kimbro wants online communication to be at such a level that: it’s as easy to talk to someone online as it is with a normal offline face to face conversation. His litmus for this is: if you have to have a specific topic before a discussion, then there is already too much difficulty involved which needs ironing out.
Now, instant messaging is mostly there, you might say, but Lion is talking about taking it to a whole new level. The end result of this is that communication will allow learning, humanities natural state of ‘play’ to be dramatically extended, to the level that we should expect of the 21st century. We need it. It’s either a bunch of top-programmers hanging out for an entire weekend (for a bunch of weekends), or highly interactive implementations of the Semantic Web and OverHear, the effect is the same: intimate communication for a rapidly developing world, that is sorely needed.
Ultimately it will have to be web based, because we simply can’t have all the worlds top developers in Silicon Valley and Seattle. People get left out, with the exclusivity dramatically effecting development speeds for technology.
I’m gonna put random snippets of information here. It’ll be more multimedia rich than my StumbleUpon blog, though may feature a lot of the same content.