Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Ch. 9

Fitting Our Tools To A Small World or how links between small-scale networks help facilitate the formation of resilient large networks. This is a very intriguing chapter, but mostly because of how foreign it feels to the school and classroom environment where we actively discourage most of our students from maximizing the diversity of their potential networks. Again, much of what we do reinforces what happens at the School->Classroom level. The number of physics' student networks at my school might be limited to one per year, if my school only happens to offer one physics class per year. My physics network might be limited to only those fifteen students who are in that class with me. If we're generous, we could double it to take into account the students who took the course last year. This is a small drop in the bucket when compared to the number of students in my district who take physics annually. Roughly 800 students write Physics 30 in my district, allowing for some degree of attrition among those who enroll but never write the exam, as well as students who decline to take Physics 30, we could easily imagine the number of students annually enrolled in Physics 20 (the precursor) to be 1000 students. Would you rather have the opportunity to be in a support network with 1000 people all having the same basic experiences and problems, or fifteen? The other school district operating in my hometown is twice as large as mine, which means we could increase the number of students in the Physics 20 network to 3000 if we allowed for some degree of cross-District interaction.

Currently these sort of connections are impossible because the starting unit of our online organization is the school.

Not the student.