elearning and the outflanking approach

A New Yorker article last week about emergent elearning practices describes the development of an emergent, bottom-up, Web-based, user-driven, and extremely flexible practices.  Short version: junior officers built Web sites to quickly obtain information about the rapidly-shifting battle, but also to garner feedback.  The projects sound like an elearning, .mil version of OhMyNews!

But notice this quiet, telling detail.  The US Army had already built a learning center, yet soldiers increasingly bypassed it in their need for speedy information and feedback:

    Officer after officer told me that they use CALL when they have the leisure, but it’s Companycommand or Platoonleader they check regularly and find most useful...

I'm reminded of history from half a century ago, where American scientists bypassed public teacher resistance to new pedagogical methods. 
I'll resist the easy jokes about outflanking, and suggest two observations.  First, this is the sort of dynamic slippage that presentations of educational structures usually ignore.  Second, the rise of Companycommand and its ilk, and the incursion of teaching films in the 1950s, offer some comparative frameworks for considering other computer-mediated teaching and learning projects.

Comments

[Brian]

Most interesting.

I have a dumb question... by "dynamic slippage" do you mean the tendency of user communities toward alternative contexts when the existing ones are unsatisfactory? Or something more specific?

[Bryan]

The former, Brian. That tendency is sometimes creative, even illicit, and can reshape what constitutes the community.

[Gardner]

Yes. It's not "if you build it they will come." It's "if you don't build it, then they will build it, and then they will come, and they won't tell you where it is, will they, Mr. Jones?"

Exhibit A: http://www.thefacebook.com. I've been meaning to blog on that one for some time.

Thanks for linking to that article, Bryan. I would have missed that one, most likely.