For education, or any cognitive content, in the new cloud concept for the open Internet the action is at the node level. Education’s traditional trees of subject matter and curricula cannot hold their form in the mushy dynamics of the content cloud that is billowing up from multiplying server farms. These old forms of resources can be placed on static webpages, but bundled as they are, the elements of ideas these static pages warehouse cannot effectively participate in the pattern forming emergence of networked learning resources.
In the illustration for this post, I combined a graphic of a learn node with an image of a synapse from the work of the Sanger Institute’s team on Genes to Cognition. The team is led by Dr. Seth Grant who has given permission to use the graphic to illustrate ideas about Net content. It is compelling to compare the synapse and the node in the cloud where related bits of ideas are present at the same url. Without the interconnections at the smallest unit in the Net cloud, there are no patterns — there is no emergence of concepts and context. This fact resonates with what the Sanger team says about synapses:
The synapse the junction between nerve cells is the most important component of the nervous system. It not only transmits electrical information between neurons, but also is responsible for converting the electrical signals into biochemical changes of long term memory. Using proteomic methods, our laboratory and others have characterised the composition of synapses, which are made of 1-2000 proteins. These proteins are organised into multiprotein complexes that act as molecular machines.
Educators are challenged to get into this same kind of investigation, into using node level connectivity to form learning resources in the cloud.
