Those are feelings–along with exhiliration, enthusiasm, wonder–as one stands in the global flow of ideas, information at the intersection of social media tools, right? At least, they are for me.

With those amorphous feelings clouding my vision, like a haze of harried hornets, I found these excerpts from “Scaling John Seely Brown” worth reflecting on, and, being grateful for:

Why I would also love to “Scale John Seely Brown” is because, like the best thinkers of our moment, he knows that learning is a continuum and that any institution, from the preschool to the stock exchange, that forgets its learning mission is going to founder.  In times of tremendous change, any system that closes itself off from learning will experience an inevitable entropy, and, eventually, devolution and extinction.  That is as true for our institutions of formal education as it is for those workplaces that foolishly try to cling to the past, that put their hands over their ears, trying, collectively, to shut out the siren voices of change…
“Scaling JSB” means staying fresh to new ideas, and doing so without the usual drags on the new: nostalgia or utopianism.  It means being willing to understand we live in a world that changes fast but, since we are all changing together and since we are all interconnected, well, we can handle it….
Finding ways to collaborate iteratively, as a process and not a product, more as a Twitter stream than as a source code, is the trick.  Emphasizing the small and the doable, rather than the gigantic and the idealistic, is probably the best way to embrace differences with imagination, creativity, innovation, a sense of realism but also a sense of play.  Besides, if you start small, you can always scale up.

Aside from the buds of excitement, have you ever stopped to reflect on the other changes a fast-changing world brings?

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