All together now

This is a continuation of my series of retrospective reviews of seminal  learning and technology books. I have scoured my personal book library in search of a dozen books that have influenced my own thinking, and share a synopsis of their contents with you. For previous reviews start here. Today's book recommendation is the fourth in the series:

Clay Shirky (2008) Here Comes Everybody. London: Penguin.

The strapline to Clay Shirky's book is 'How change happens when people come together.' From the very early days of civilisation, people have been teaming up to achieve change. In fact, human civilisation has been founded upon change, and without teamwork, collective action, social movements and group effort, much of that change would not have been achievable. Shirky's book delivers that message strongly, and there are clear implications for education, especially where groups use new tools to promote change. Shirky says:

'Collective action, where a group acts as a whole, is even more complex than collaborative production, but here again new tools give life to new forms of action. This in turn challenges existing institutions, by eroding the institutional monopoly on large-scale coordination' (p 143).

The book features a number of examples of collective action using new tools, including the creation of the world's largest repository of knowledge, Wikipedia, which didn't even exist prior to 2001. Shirky shows how, similar to hive and swarm behaviour seen in animals, humans perform in networks and thrive within 'architectures of participation' - so whilst bees make hives, humans create mobile telephone networks and the internet. Shirky also underlines the importance of one specific aspect of the internet - social media tools - as 'amplifiers' of ideas and collective actions. He points out that collective action is harder to promote than individual action, but once it gets going, it is very difficult to stop. He draws on a variety of examples from social history, but if a new updated edition of this book were to be published, I have no doubt he would draw on recent social events such as the Arab Spring and citizen journalism as examples of effective social collective action using new media tools. For educators, the question is how much of this potential we can harness within formal learning contexts. We know instinctively and empirically that people learn best when they are in rich social contexts. It is probable that many of the world's most trenchant problems could be addressed through education with social tools to amplify the process. Shirky remarks:

'There are real and permanent social dilemmas, which can only be optimised for, never completely resolved. The human social repertoire includes many such optimisations, which social tools can amplify' (p 188).

This book makes it clear that in an ever increasingly social world, telecommunication and social media are connecting us more richly. Education still has a long way to go before we can begin to claim that  harnessing the power of the collective worldwide intelligence to provide equally rich learning opportunities for our students. But if we consider the 'here comes everybody' ethos Shirky advocates, we will begin to understand that everyone, teachers and students together, can equally create knowledge, organise and share it, and in so doing we will benefit together as a global learning community.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


All together now by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.