Putting Connectivism to Work

Interesting thoughts in this post by Dave Pollard. Dave writes:

My experience suggests that some of the greatest challenges to doing 'good' work are knowledge and learning related:

• Most people are ignorant of how the world really works.
• We live in a world of great imaginative poverty, with a dearth of practical ideas about how to make work, and our world, better.
• Our conversational skills are abysmal.
• While we learn mostly from conversation, from being shown, and thenceforth from practice (all collaborative processes), our learning institutions, programs and systems deprive us of all three, and instead force us to try to learn from reading, listening, and being told (all individual processes), after which we are expected to be 'expert' without any real practice.
• This individualized approach to knowledge leads us to depend on 'experts', 'executives', 'managers' and 'consultants' and build systems that are hierarchical and support a cult of leadership, instead of drawing on collective knowledge, collaboration and community and building systems that are egalitarian and cooperative.
• We are propagandized to be competitive and to lack empathy for others, which deprives us of the will and opportunity to work and learn collaboratively and to share knowledge with others.