A long, long time ago, in the mid 90's, one of my teachers introduced me to the Club of Rome. He mentioned it briefly in a class I was taking on curriculum design for adults. Looking back on it, the program was cutting edge with a primary focus on collaborative learning.

The Club of Rome produced their first report - Limits to Growth - through MIT, in the early 70's suggesting that the world was small and that we had limited resources and that we needed to smarten up. The second report - No Limits to Learning - suggested that there was one resource we had a surplus of, a cognitive surplus. However, to use that resource, the ability to learn, we needed to ... smarten up :-)

Ok, what they really said was that there are two ways to learn. We can learn by shock or by innovation. If we want to learn by innovation we we need to be able and willing to anticipate what might happen and we need to get everyone to participate in finding solutions.

This idea, that I took to be the "truth" has guided my thinking about knowledge, information, learning and teaching for the past decade. A decade that has seen technology catch up with and enable those ideas.

When I read posts like this I can't help but reflect back on those ideas wondering if there is a link back to them. Wondering if the post I'm reading now will inform my thinking in the same way. I suspect it might, in a collective, networked, kind of way.