??In the participatory era, media will no longer be delivered one way from a media company to an audience…but by audience members to other audience members. The distinction between content creators and consuming audiences first gets blurry and then disappears completely…Instead of media being delivered as a sermon or lecture, it becomes a conversation among the people in the audience?? (quote from Andreas Kluth, Technology Correspondent of The Economist)

I’ve just read my way through two outstanding articles/papers that provide much clarity to the whole debate around social software and the way in which this is changing our approach to learning, communicating and living!.

The first is from the April 26 edition of “The Economist” magazine, in a feature section titled Among the Audience – a survey of new media The feature is actually a series of articles covering topics such as blogs wikis and podcasting, as well as those that explore the phenomena associated with the use of these tools, such as the dawn of interactive journalism, defining a media company in this new world, and an attempt to summarise the promise and pitfalls of these new environments and tools. (All of these artlcles area available online, along with a selection of audio interviews with some of the authors.)

This has to be one of the ‘must reads’ for anyone who is wanting to quickly come up to speed with what these new technologies are about and how they are or may impact on many of the ways we currently do business – including education!

The second paper is from George Seimens, and is titled Learning in Synch with Life – New Models, New Processes (downloadable PDF), which was prepared by George after he was asked by Google to submit a whitepaper at their recent training summit

In this paper George evaluates the diverse needs of learners today, and details the shortcomings of courses/content and LMSs in meeting those needs. He goes on to recast learning as a network formation process, occurring within the structure of organisational ecologies (which he refers to as connectivism) and then details some of his implementation concerns and challenges.

The paper is a work in progress – but appeals very much to my beliefs and understandings of what is emerging. The paper is illustrated with several useful diagrams that help explain some of the complex ideas being presented, inlcuding such things a a ‘Learning ecology’ and the relationship between an “adpative learning cycle” and a “Learning Development Cycle”

I’d recommend both of these!