Paradigms

... or paradiggems as they're affectionately known in this family!

On last year's Homer course, I met their ancestor, paradeigmata. A paradeigma was a mythological tale, a sort of fable that provided a key to understanding some particular dilemma by showing an example of how it had been handled in the mythical past. I wasn't quite sure how that related to the Kuhnian paradigm shifts I'd previously encountered on T171, but didn't stop to investigate.

Today I've been reading Rheingold again & came across his argument that the rise of online communities involves a paradigm shift of sorts: from the broadcast paradigm (one to many communication) to the network paradigm (many to many). What makes this particularly applicable to education is that the first fits a didactic, teacher-centred pedagogy & the second fits a constructivist, learner-centred pedagogy. I don't think I'd fully, consciously, made the connection between the two sets of concepts before.

Yet I should have done, as I saw the network analogy in Bob Taylor's horizontal management. (See Bluefluff's posts here & here.)

Rheingold's chapter is here.

I don't think Rheingold's usage of the term exactly matches either the traditional 'exemplar' sense, or the Kuhnian 'mindset' sense, but I quite like his middle way.