Educational Insanity

In response to Scott McLeod’s 140-character book review contest, I submitted an entry that summarized/synthesized two books in less than 140 characters.  I wrote:

ORGANIZING (EVERYBODY AND/OR EVERYTHING) IS DIFFERENT NOW.

That’s it.  Put together “Here Comes Everybody” and “Everything is Miscellaneous” and that’s what you get.

For those who read the books, those 57 characters should make perfect sense.

For those who’ve read either or neither, it should be fairly self-explanatory.  But, if not, basically, HCE is about how Web 2.0 lowers (and in many cases, eliminates) the transaction costs of organizing a group of like-minded individuals to achieve a common goal.  EIM is about how the digitizing and tagging of information means that old organizing schemes developed for physical information (e.g. the Dewey Decimal system) have given way to digitzing+tagging+aggregating.

That’s it.  Class over.  Thanks for coming and you can now go read something that actually requires book-length treatment.

1. Marshall says:

   July 18, 2008 at 6:32 pm

   Jon

   Finished HCE a few weeks ago and am getting geared up to read EIM soon. Your post makes me wonder if I’m wasting my time…HCE was pretty accurate from your phrase. Not sure if I want to read a bunch of examples of how this is true (and I believe it is, though I’m not up to speed).
2. Rob Jacobs says:

   July 18, 2008 at 6:52 pm

   Jon, dead on. I might add, Space and Distance are outdated problems.