The Dimensions of Learning -- Individual to Massively Collaborative

In searching for the frontier in the learning space, it's helpful to make a map and specify the dimensions. One important dimension on the learning space has been the continuum from individual to group learning. It's no surprise that group learning has given way from an endpoint to a midpoint as technology has enabled more and more of us to be in the same place at the same, *coughs*, ansynchronous time. That's a good illustration of how the frontier is pushed by technology. We were once comfortable with exploring how groups learn, and now we find that people are learning in what we could call, Massively Multi-Learner, Online Collaboration, or MMLOC, with apologies to MMORPG.

With a dimension defined, where are we on the continuum? Everquest, Guildwars, and Secondlife are great examples of systems where MMORPG has been applied, and some online learning has been enabled, so do they qualify as MMLOCs? The learning retreats from "massive" back to small group interaction with a massive audience from which to choose randomly. How massive can we get? Is a course with 2000 learners massive? Judge for yourself at the Massively Open Online Course, MOOC.

To be truly massive, you need to get out of the course model, as there will be limits to the coordinated action required in a course (unless we redefine "course"). One such place to go is to online learning communities where there's a defined purpose, such as learning to create curriculum or learning to apply social networking communities to learning, or even developing open software. Two of the larger defined learning communities I have found are curriki.org (size unknown) and Ning in Education (~8,000). If we're willing to adopt a model of learning where a community includes lurkers (those looking in at the community) to apprentices (those practicing on the periphery) all the way to masters (those at the center who are leading the community), then sourceforge.net is a great example with 2 million registered users dedicated to using and creating open software. Less project-oriented than sourceforge, more traditional, and bigger still, by this definition, is wikipedia.org. Wikipedia has a set of lurkers (unregistered users) that approaches the set of all online users, a set of registered users, and a much smaller set of core contributors.

Is the size of wikipedia the endpoint? The answer depends, again, on the definition of learning. If we count interacting with and creating digital content as learning, the collected set of web users is a learning community that has been thriving since its invention. (Anyone know the latest count of wikipedia or the web?)

But there is one endpoint not yet reached. Borrowing from Ray Kurzweil's idea of  "singularity", all of humanity will someday be interconnected in a meaningful thinking, collaborative learning singularity, that viewed from a distance can be seen as a highly complex organism. Is that the end? Let's really push the boundaries to include learning by machines as well - especially all machines and all people interacting in a single, cybernetic cloud. We'll explore whether that's beyond the frontier in future entries and may conclude that degree of machine integration to learning is also a dimension.