"Minds on Fire" article and the structure of our course

[Oops, I accidentally posted this to my own blog first, but I meant to post it here.]

I've been thinking about how the "Minds on Fire" article relates to the structure of this course. When I read the article, some phrases and ideas that jumped out at me were:

"Learning to be" a member of a social learning community -- learning its norms, etc. -- tacit knowledge. On the Web you can do a lot of this even BEFORE becoming an expert in the particular content area or skill involved.

Collateral learning / peripheral learning

Access to rich practice-based learning communities

What I'm thinking (sorry if this seems too obvious) is that that's probably a lot of how Dennis is hoping that we will experience this course. He's set up a large array of different ways for us to participate in online communities (even if it's mostly all our course community), and different tools to begin to explore a little bit at a time. We're figuring out, bit by bit, what sorts of things to write where in all of the online community venues, and we're developing this perspective partly by reading each others' posts. With the tools, it's quite possible to start to do "real" things already even though most of us are nowhere near experts with any of these tools yet (as when I tried out that Spezify site that someone -- I think Suzanne? -- mentioned, and lucked (?) into something truly useful for the writing project that I'm doing with my class right now). . . . In other words, one goal / philosophical underpinning of this course is for us to learn the material by experiencing and exploring it in exactly the way that this article says the web is really good at providing: through social learning communities that (unlike, say, a discipline in traditional academia) we can contribute meaningfully to even as beginners.