This part is about how we discuss and adopt belonging practices differently in the world we now live in with all of its varied inputs, communities, and decisions to be made.
Learning in a time of abundance (the book)
You know that feeling when all of your neurons seem to be firing at once? That’s how I felt throughout reading and after finishing Dave Cormier’s excellent book Learning in the Time of Abundance: Community is the Curriculum. It’s like my unconscious mind had been spinning on a dual-part question – why is everything so much harder than it used to be and how do I balance it all? – that I hadn’t quite formed, let alone found an answer to, and Dave’s book helped me normalize the question and *maybe* find an iota of peace in the uncertainty and changing nature of the answer (?!?!?).
At this point you might be saying something to the effect of “So what IS this book about?”. Yep – that’s actually harder to answer than you might think. Honestly my first go-to response is – Just read the book. It’s short (169 pages).
Here’s my attempted synopsis anyway:
We can basically slice time in two modern slices: before the internet became a popular thing to use and after the internet became a popular thing to use. Before the internet became a popular thing to use (somewhere in the mid to late 90s?), technology offered a 1:1 replacement for what we already were doing in some other way AND we lived in time of knowledge scarcity. After the internet became a popular thing to use, our technology usage was not a 1:1 replacement for something we were already doing AND we live in a time of knowledge abundance. And because the internet is still relatively new (it’s maybe 30 years old in 2024 if we’re talking the early, early days of more popular usage), our ways of digesting information inputs/outputs and dealing with the decision-making processes we evolved in the time of knowledge scarcity often don’t suit us anymore. We have to make SO MANY decisions that we aren’t as certain or knowledgeable about (HELLO THE AGE OF UNCERTAINTY), we have abundant information constantly streaming to us on every platform (which we are mostly ill equipped to deal with), and we can make so many new connections with other humans who were out of reach before, but then how do we prioritize those connections we make online vs. those we have made (or make) F2F?
AND if we start discussing teaching, learning, and our current educational systems, we still educate the masses from the model of knowledge scarcity (before internet) and Dave asks an extraordinarily simple question which may actually upend the ways in which we teach, learn, and think about fundamental human needs like belonging – WHY?
[NOTE – Dave, I’m 100% sure, explains this SO MUCH BETTER in this episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast: https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/learning-in-a-time-of-abundance/ (Transcript here: https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/learning-in-a-time-of-abundance/#transcriptcontainer).]
My not-so-politically-correct response
To all of this, I often say “DAMMIT DAVE”. (Actually – to be fair – I usually write colorful expletives coupled with the quotes that are currently frustrating me to Dave on one of our backchannels.)
Why the passionate response? Well, personally, I appreciate Dave quite a lot and have talked with him several times (some recorded, most not) throughout our internet connected time as friends (yeah for my PLN!), and he is one of those folks with whom I can have an open, honest, no-holds barred conversation that surprises and delights us both. So that passionate response is said with a lot of love.
But professionally, reading this book felt like a gong infused my soul and kept being struck. It rang so incredibly true with my own experience on several levels. And it’s catalyzed my thinking on what 21st century teaching should look like for my students. But catalysis doesn’t mean I have a plan. Yet.
Belonging in a time of Abundance
The big question is – how does all of this fit with belonging? Well, there are several up- and downsides to that question. One upside? We can build a prosocial web for ourselves that increases our belonging in different communities than the ones we know F2F. Academic Twitter was that community for me – a place where I was not only embraced for sharing my thoughts on education and teaching but also challenged and encouraged to challenge the prevailing thoughts on education. When Twitter died (yes I know it’s X now, but many academics, including myself, who previously had found inviting and safe-ish space there, don’t now and have therefore left), my PLN (personal and professional learning network) split to the four winds. And now it takes WAY more time and energy to connect in the ways that are meaningful (that’s kinda of a downside, isn’t it?).
Another upside? Those communities can be comprised of local, national, or international folks we would have never met otherwise. And we can read the lived experiences of folks who would have never been given space to share in the knowledge scarcity model. So – overall the internet *can* be great at times.
What are the downsides, then? EVERYONE has an opinion on the internet, and figuring out who to trust, who not to trust, and what fields they are trustworthy/not trustworthy to provide information in has become a full-time job. Also, because everyone has an opinion, we get trolls as well as hate groups who have larger footprints and outreach possibilities and who probably should have stayed marginalized in our society.
Also a downside? Information abundance doesn’t mean we have knowledge or wisdom about that abundance or each piece of information within it. It doesn’t mean the abundance is meaningful. And it doesn’t mean we handle the abundance well – psychologically, socially, culturally, or intellectually. Yet. (Give us 400 years to evolve (a lá the printing press) and maybe we’ll get there.)
Remaining Questions we need to answer for ourselves [ideally, as Dave says in the book, Based on our values]
How do we judge truth and figure out who to trust in the age of information abundance? (I’m now reading Verified: How to think straight, get duped less, and make better decisions about what to believe online by Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg to answer this very question for myself)
What are our values and how do they interact with the world of information abundance we now live within? (Some values excavation and affirmation exercises can be found here)
How do we think about belonging and community online vs. F2F? Who gets the priority in terms of time, access, etc.? (As someone who has spent WAY too much time on Twitter and now Discord and BlueSky, I’m not sure I’m the right person to answer this…even for myself.)
When and how should we keep our mouths shut (and our hands idle) and *not* offer an opinion on something? How we intentionally keep our ears open when we are silent? How does our silence align with our values and expertise? And how do we correct when we’ve amplified misinformation?
How do we create time to just be? How does that time combat the constant exhaustion from endless decision-making we now live in?
How does exhaustion amplify our cognitive biases and our inability to see that we are using them?
How do we create learning spaces that embrace information abundance AND belonging? Without being completely overwhelming to students? How do we embrace (with, perhaps, some scaffolds and framing) building knowledge and wisdom within the abundance and within community? How do we scale those learning spaces for larger class sizes?
Moving forward
Moving forward is always difficult in times of uncertainty. In the book, Dave says something to this effect (which is *totally* a Rissa paraphrase): embracing uncertainty can be mitigated too some degree by finding communities that can help normalize it and find creative space within it. I tend to agree, although I tend to confront life with (the very best version of) the scientific method, and, thus, often embrace uncertainty and information abundance with some amount of resigned reluctance. And yet, Dave is right (as he often is) – communities in which we know we belong help us understand ourselves and our values better and are therefore critical to our approaches to information abundance and uncertainty.
REferences
Caulfield, M. & Wineburg, S. (2023). Verified: How to think straight, get duped less, and make better decisions about what to believe online. University of Chicago Press.
Cormier, D. (2024). Learning in the Time of Abundance: Community is the Curriculum. Johns Hopkins University Press.
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