I tagged along and arriving a few minutes early noticed that there was an increasing number of people standing and strolling around, just like people do – tourists, office workers, etc. Quite a few had iPods plugged into their ears. Again, this is totally normal.

More people kept arriving. At a few seconds to 6.46, a countdown was started then, at zero, almost everyone turned up their music and started dancing (OK, we did too). A great and enthusiastic time was had by all then 30 minutes later the party dissolved again.

A few tourists were left looking rather bemused by the best part of 1000 people dancing to the apparent silence.

What particularly interests me is the mashup of social networking going on here:

• the mix of electronic viral connections through the phones, Skype, MySpace, sites such as www.dontstayin.com and word of mouth,
• the fact that real people actually came together in one location for a communal activity (and the synchronisation of the start was an important element),
• the almost complete lack of direct face-to-face communication (everyone having ear-buds jammed in their heads),
• the fact that everyone was dancing, as much “together” as they would be in a club, but to their own chosen tune,
• the way that the mob evaporated away at the end
• by 11 today (16 hours later) there are 773 pictures of the event at: http://www.dontstayin.com/uk/london/st-pauls-cathedral/2007/jul/19/event-131750

I wonder what parallels and lessons it holds for us about how we might engage people in collaborative learning and how we connect with each other in the 21st century.

It isn’t about oversimplifying complex issues, it is about giving the issues some colour and shape before delving.

He also went on the show a list of potential benefits from thinking about and applying appropriate filters to how we approach data. Here he reintroduced the vital concepts of networks, distributed knowledge and connectivism citing benefits (I’ve put my comments in parenthesis):
- Network models of learning are adaptive (because networks are inherently dynamic)
- Ecologies must be diverse and enabling (or we’re heading back to a model where we teach as we were taught not how different people might learn)
- Today’s information is tomorrow’s sense-making (I love this one. It brings to mind that when we ask for information there’s a moment when we realise that we’ve got an awful lot of stuff to make sense of before we can make use of it).
- Sane, digital life (in other words, not trying to take a drink of water from the fire hose)
- Complex, integrated understanding (again reinforcing the point that complexity is an integral part of understanding)
- Multi-faceted
- Multi-ontology

You can see a recording of the whole <i>Patterns and sense-making: Information visualisation</i> session at: http://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/event/playback