This piece on Slate by Duncan Watts (author of the outstanding book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age) captures both the Nirvana of decentralized intelligence that everybody seeks and its frustrating elusiveness. It’s a must-read for anybody interested in “emergent learning” or social learning or communities of practice or…you know…that stuff.
Watts is a sociologist and an expert in the theory of networks, i.e., how that whole “six degrees of separation” thing happens. If you take that and add in a dash of distributed cognition, then you get something very close to the idea that everybody is sniffing around. It’s not emergence, but who cares? A rose by any other name smells as sweet.
Now. If we can only figure out how to actually make it work….