I’m reading a book about Wikipedia and somewhere around the half way point the author mentions the essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” (pdf) Realizing I had never read this often mentioned discussion of open source projects and online development, I put the book down and instead took a 35 page side track through this work.
It has me thinking about classrooms, our purpose, and how they can be the most effective.
In this essay, the author places two ways to complete a project against each other. The cathedral, which is “carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time,” struck me as the way that things are often done in curriculum development and in classrooms. Seeing our purpose as passing along knowledge, classrooms often labour along under (and as part of) a structure which is top heavy and slow moving. Everything is properly laid out and controlled. Contrast this with the “great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches,” that is often seen in things like open source software development and two very different systems emerge.
Schools have always been about finding “the best” (literature, scientific ideas, etc) that a society has to offer and passing them along to a younger generation. Yet with evidence of the growth and effectiveness of so many passion based communities involved in sharing their developments and innovations, I begin to wonder about the effectiveness of our system. Combine the bazaar, which has ideas running into each other, with Chris Anderson from TED who writes in this article about the power of crowd accelerated innovation and an understanding begins to emerge about another way education could be accomplished.
What happens when students have access to people and ideas around the globe in greater numbers? What happens when they begin to have real opportunities to work in passion based, global learning communities? What happens when they have more control over their learning? Would this put kids on paths of upward innovation spirals and engage them with learning?
These are powerful ideas for classrooms and for learning.