All day we hear things like “the world is flat” “wisdom of crowds” “always on communications” and more and more and they are all right – in their own way. Well, except that wisdom of crowds thing. Can’t say I have a lot of faith in most individuals so a crowd of them doesn’t make it much better – just more of the same. I think we have a good example of it happening now. The current global financial crisis spread like wildfire; because there is so much “connectedness” and the doom and gloom message gets to everyone rapidly.
If there’d been less availability of the bad news, then far fewer people would have gone into panic, far fewer banks would have started foreclosing, far fewer people would have sold shares. But, that all happened, the spirits of doom and gloom won.
Since the capacity of people to react so fast to something bad is so powerful why hasn’t someone researched how to harness that same capacity to spread the good stuff? Why are we still trying to spread the good word about the capabilities of educational technology to improve a teacher’s lot? How is it, the right people still don’t know a student’s study life improves with some classroom 2.0 support? What is it that stymies the good, but filters through the bad? I wish I knew. I wish we’d found the way to stop telling each other in the choir and got the congregations singing too.
Wisdom of crowds? Pffft!