Jon Udell, quoting his friend Ray Cote, brought me back to Castell and Cardosa’s “self-programmable worker”. Which, if we cast education in strictly economic terms, means we need self-programmable learners.
I am fascinated at what it takes to create a self-programmable learner. In the hundreds, if not thousands of hours that I have spent watching kids read, write, and participate online I have seen this learner.
The mind will move fast but also knows when to crawl. Interstices grow from the smallest nuggets of knowledge. Ideas get created on the fly. Like the courts and pornography or Wittgenstein and games I know when I see it but could never fully capture the self-programmable learner.
I will just go with Udell’s recommendations for education: Access to knowledge, access to publishing. Motivation and context.
Thus to be a self-programmable learner means to be a networked learner. A learner who shares a common purpose with multiple nodes of knowledge.