A Networked Digital Community
Pioneering New Media in the 21st Century
other pages
ideals | trade-offs | realities
Horizon article
about Ricci Streetthis page
organizing principles
ideals | trade-offs | realities
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Long ago, a glacier gouged a slice out of this steep cliff on the edge of the sea. The water from the mountains grew into a river that found the sea where the glacier had rested. Recently, people settled at the bottom of the cliff along the mouth of the river. They are building Ricci Street, a networked digital community pioneering new media in the 21st century. "In 1596, Matteo Ricci taught
the Chinese how to build a memory palace. He told them that the size of
the palace would depend on how much they wanted to remember." To the other Jesuits back in Europe as well as to his Chinese hosts, Matteo Ricci was an
The spirit and fine example of Matteo Ricci inspire us today. |
Ricci Street |
Ricci Street is a place. It is not a ...
software
program
pedagogical system
textbook or other
publication
finished project
It is a toolkit of technologies and the beginnings of an online learning community.
We don't have a vocabulary yet to name Ricci Street and all its parts. In Weaving the Web, Tim Berners-Lee speaks humorously of his attempts a decade ago to explain the World Wide Web before it had any content and before there was a browser. His marriage of hypertext and the Internet expressed in metaphors and sketches made little sense to the most advanced computer experts of 1989. Looking back, Berners-Lee calls his original diagrams "a bit dotty". I have experienced the same difficulties trying to explain the pedagogical implications of the Web to my faculty colleagues. And I've been called a lot worse than dotty.
The solution for Berners-Lee was to have people experience the Web. As that experience becomes a widespread social phenomenon, it is clear that some people "get it", usually right away, and other people don't. Regardless of whether they get it or not, some people welcome it and some people don't.
When I began Ricci Street in June 1999, I saw it as a place that
combined a library and classroom, where students traditionally do not talk to
each other; they listen to experts, be they teachers or writers. In addition,
Ricci Street could be a "third place", where students listen to each
other.
University of West Florida sociologist and Buffalo native Ray Oldenburg, who
popularized the phrase in a printed book, The Great
Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other
Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, is a self-confessed Luddite. I believe
he's missing the point. So do others:
Here Comes A Regular
Marylaine Block
My Word's Worth, March 6, 2000
I don't put much stock in all the studies about how the net isolates people from the real people around them. Yes, the net can become an all-consuming passion for some, but for many of us, I think it makes up for the systematic elimination of great good places from our towns.
The
"third place"
by Klaus Schwienhorst
Trinity College Dublin, 1998
In The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg argues for the importance of third places: "Third places exist on neutral ground and serve to level their guests to a condition of social equality. Within these places, conversation is the primary activity and the major vehicle for the display and appreciation of human personality and individuality." In terms of learning, they bring together two of the major learning concepts in recent years, the Vygotskian framework of interaction and collaboration and Papert's constructionist framework of interactivity within meaningful environments and with meaningful learning tools created or assembled by the learner himself.
We are not talking here about putting the World Wide Web into the curriculum. We are talking about putting the curriculum into a web.
Key
C = course
K = knowledge
S = skills
A = attitudes
A traditional classroom and paper curriculum:
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C1 |
C2 |
C3 |
The organizing principle is the courses, which are arranged for the convenience of the faculty, especially respecting their disciplines. Some faculty call it integrated because they can see patterns. For example, K3 follows logically upon K2 just as C2 follows upon C1. As long as C1 is a prerequisite for C2, then the curriculum is integrated for these faculty. But what about the students?
Now let's move to the Web all the things that would be said and read and handed back and forth in the classroom. This is a webbified curriculum:
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C1 |
C2 |
C3 |
Not much difference at all except there's no paper. The Web is used to distribute information; it replaces the textbook and the handout. The organizing principle is still course-by-course, is still from the faculty's point of view. The integration is still potential, the low-hanging fruit obvious -- to the faculty.
It's a good start, but hardly takes advantage of the Web. What's next?
Externalize the K, S, and A. Pull them out of the courses and put them somewhere. Where? What about Ricci Street, a web site to support a learning community?
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C1 |
C2 |
C3 |
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K1, K2, K3, K4, K5, K6, etc. |
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How would the K, S, and A be arranged? What would be the organizing principle?
Instead of noting low-hanging fruit, the faculty can pick it, process it, and make nourishing juices. Instead of just noting patterns and sequencing courses, the faculty can
take the
students' point of view instead of their own and their disciplines'
talk to each other about
ideas, even across disciplines
organize and integrate
the ideas in the curriculum, not just the courses in the curriculum
Perhaps the experience of a community of learners with an online meeting place like Ricci Street will break faculty and administrators out of hardened categories. Some dinosaurs evolved into birds. Those in higher education who so evolve on the Web will find their path influenced by ideals, trade-offs, and realities. Those who don't, I predict, will turn into fossils.
What is Ricci Street trying to be? features
What ideas guide it? values | privacy policy
What is it similar to? models
What's happening in the larger world? forces
Who is Ricci Street for? audience
What's on Ricci Street? content
Why is it chunked and linked the way it is? structure
Why does it look and behave the way it does? aesthetics
How geeky do you have to be to use it? mechanics
What software and computer services were used for Ricci Street? colophon
Where does the content come from? credits
Who owns Ricci Street? copyright
‘No reason to get excited,’ the thief he kindly spoke.
‘There are many here among us for whom life is but a joke.
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate.
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.’
-- Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower (1968)
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