This is exactly what has happened to instructional design, and could by <a href="http://effectivedesign.org/2008/02/11/instructional-design-in-academia-where-theory-and-practice-rarely-meet/">why theory and practice don’t meet</a>. <strong>So much theory has been introduced that we can no longer see how instruction is actually designed.</strong> That’s why I think many times it has become easier for novice (in this case non-academically trained) designers can do it so often. They are not encumbered by the fog of theory.

<img src="http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/images/socialfluency.jpg" title="" alt="social fluency" />

Change has to start with an identified need, not with a good idea. Generally, we only change when we must. Listen for needs.

Change, like great research, begins with asking important questions, and provoking respondents to self-change instead of trying to persuade or impose it.

Experiment. The best, profound changes come from masses of iterative learning and exploration of possibilities.

When you think of yourself as a learner, you begin to act as one, and suddenly all the potential of networks and online information begins to make sense

It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory.

Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did.

A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

1. How to predict consequences

The prediction of consequences is part science, part mathematics, and part visualization.

2. How to read

Oddly, by this I do not mean 'literacy' in the traditional sense, but rather, how to look at some text and to <span style="font-style: italic;">understand</span>, in a deep way, what is being asserted

<span style="font-weight: bold;">3. How to distinguish truth from fiction</span>

The first thing to learn is to actually question what you are told, what you read, and what you see on television. Do not simply accept what you are told. Always ask, how can you know that this is true? What evidence would lead you to believe that it is false?

<span style="font-weight: bold;">4. How to empathize</span>

Empathy isn't some sort of bargain. It isn't the application of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethic_of_reciprocity">Golden Rule</a>. It is a <span style="font-style: italic;">genuine</span> feeling in yourself that operates in synch with the other person, a way of accessing their inner mental states through the sympathetic operation of your own mental states. You are polite because <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span> feel bad when you are rude; you are honest because <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span> feel offended when you lie.

5. How to be creative

Creativity, in other words, often operates by <span style="font-style: italic;">metaphor</span>, which means you need to learn how to <span style="font-style: italic;">find things in common</span> between the current situation and other things you know.

<span style="font-weight: bold;">6. How to communicate clearly</span>

Communicating clearly is most of all a matter of knowing what you want to say, and then employing some simple tools in order to say it.

7. How to Learn

Learning to learn is the same as learning anything else. It takes practice.

8. How to stay healthy

Finally, remember: you never have to justify protecting your own life and health.

9. How to value yourself

You can have all the knowledge and skills in the world, but they are meaningless if you do not feel personally empowered to use them; it's like owning a <a href="http://www.lamborghini.co.uk/">Lamborghini</a> and not having a driver's license.

10. How to live meaningfully

If you don't decide what is worth doing, someone will decide for you, and at some point in your life you will realize that you haven't done what is worth doing at all.

Information overload does not exist. Failing information strategies do exist. We were brought up with information strategies based on scarcity. We live in times of information abundance.

A little while ago, <a href="http://www.jarche.com">Harold Jarche</a> sent this quotation: “”Information overload does not exist. Failing information strategies do exist. ”

Last year, <a href="http://www.smeal.psu.edu/news/latest-news/nov07/telecom.html">researchers from Penn State</a> analyzed 46 studies of telecommuting conducted over two decades and covering almost 13,000 employees. Their sweeping inquiry concluded that working from home has "favorable effects on perceived autonomy, work-family conflict, job satisfaction, performance, turnover intent, and stress." The only demonstrable drawback is a slight fraying of the relationships between telecommuters and their colleagues back at headquarters — largely because of jealousy on the part of the latter group. That's the first problem you solve when you kill your office.

Once students get the hang of groups online, just like any mother bird, the teacher needs to slowly start pushing them out of the nest.&nbsp; And I do not mean anywhere near Middle School.&nbsp; Most of the students in a school will be ready for this kind of experience nearing High School, and I believe this age will slowly lower as time passes and this form of education becomes more common.

The process of moving the students forward from a group setting to a network will be required, so will an educator familiar with both.&nbsp; For this process to properly occur, curriculum will need to be specifically designed and implemented, taking into account, emerging technologies and student safety within an online environment.

The idea behind "being yourself" is not that you have some sort of offline life (though you may). Rather, it's a recognition that your online life encompasses the many different facets of your life, and that it is important that these facets are all represented and work together.

Those of you who've taken political science know that all of human history in political science is the division between the individual and the state. Right? The person and the group, right? And these are the two divides. And the whole purpose of politics is to find some sort of accommodation for them or if you're Ayn Rand, to favor the individual and ignore the group.<br><br> And it seems to me that networks offers that middle way. Networks offers that path that isn't the individual and isn't the group, doesn't force you to choose between the individual and the group.

But more or less, a group is a collection of entities or members according to their nature or their feature or their properties or whatever, their essential nature, maybe, their accidental nature, maybe, whatever, but according to their nature. What defines a group is the quality the members possess in common and then the number of members in that group. Groups are about nature, they're about quality, they're about mass. They're about number. <br><br>A network, by contrast, is an association – I use that word very precisely – an association of entities or members where this association is facilitated or created by a set of connections between those entities. And if you say, "Well what is a connection?" A connection is merely some conduit along which a signal can run. Well, that clarified it, didn't it? What defines a network is the nature and the extent of this connectivity. The nature and the extent to which these individuals are connected together.

I want to change the system of assessment in schools because right now we have tests and things like that that are scrupulously fair, particularly distance learning where we outline the objectives the performance metrics and the outcomes and all of that. I want to scrap that system. I want testing to be done by at random by comments from your peers and other people and strangers based on no criteria whatsoever and applied unequally and unfairly.

Networks are almost defined by the opposite, defined by their diversity. A network thrives on diversity. It wouldn't be a network without diversity.

Internet technology that encourages diversity rather than conformity includes things like personal home pages or these days, blogs. I should add to this slide MySpace profiles and things like that, your account on Flickr. All of these things that allows the individual to express themselves rather than the individual being part of some larger entity.

<p>What if Facebook worked like Blackboard (or pretty much any other LMS)? </p> <p>Imagine if every fifteen weeks Facebook:</p> <ul> <li>shut down all the groups you belonged to, </li> <li>deleted all your forum posts,</li> <li>removed all the photos, videos, and other files you had shared, and</li> <li>forgot who your friends were.</li></ul>