Best learning books on the net?

Internet Time Wiki is becoming my online repository for things I often refer people to. Here’s my list of books and seminal articles. What would be on yours?

The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. (Full text). Chris Locke, Doc Searles, David Weinberger, Rick Levine. The most important book written in the last half of the 20th century. “The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery.” “A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.” Seth Godin: “If you don’t think you need this book to better understand your market, that’s your second mistake!”

The Cathedral and the Bazaar Eric Raymond. Why and how open source works. Also see The Jargon File.

Deschooling Society. Ivan Illich. “Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value…. In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery.”

Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demo. Where collaboration by computer began. The debut of the mouse, hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration  involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.

What is Web 2.0? Tim O’Reilly. “Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core.”

The Underground History of American Education. John Taylor Gatto.The Silent Spring of American education.

Out of Control, The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World . Kevin Kelly. “The world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it.”"The central act of the coming era is to connect everything to everything.”"Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work.” Also New Rules for the New Economy. “The tricks of the intangible trade will become the tricks of your trade.”"The aim of swarm power is superior performance in a turbulent environment.”"To prosper, feed the web first.”

As We May Think. (1945) Vannevar Bush. “A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

Seven Principles of Learning, Institute for Research on Learning. “We are all natural lifelong learners. All of us, no exceptions. Learning is a natural part of being human. We all learn what enables us to participate in the communities of practice of which we wish to be a part.”

Engines for Education. Roger Schank and Chip Clearly. Dated by feisty hyperbook by endearing bad-boy Roger back when Andersen Consulting was laying $ millions on him.

Peter Henschel, RIP

Peter Henschel, shown here addressing the eLearning Forum in March 2001, died last week of a heart attack. I will miss him.

Peter and I first met at TechLearn several years ago. He was trumpetting a favorite theme — that learning is social and that 80% or more of corporate learning is informal. He put that meme in my head, and it influences my work to this day.

After TechLearn, Peter and I met at the Institute for Research on Learning (where he was executive director). We hoped to coax eLearning vendors to embrace and leverage informal learning — but our timing was not right.

To get a flavor of Peter’s view of the world, read his article in LiNEzine from Fall of last year.

This is a day of rememberance throughout the land. Allow me to commemorate Peter by restating the Institute for Research on Learning’s famous seven principles.

Posted by Jay Cross at September 11, 2002 08:23 PM | TrackBack