And immediately there fell from his eyes as it were scales

David Wiley asks “What would highly scalable learning look like if we invented it today…?” To which I would respond with another question, Leigh Blackall’s challenge to the flexible learning course’s online panel @8:49 “Is scalability even [an] appropriate way to be thinking about learning?”

Are we, by talking of scalability simply perpetuating an industrial model of education? An outdated model based on scarcity and top-down allocation of resources when education is increasingly based on an abundance of resource allocated over the network.

My thinking of late has been influenced by Doug Rushkoff. On WMFU’s The Media Squat he comments @32:05 that “one trap to avoid is the idea that, this false premise, (and again it’s from industrial culture) that everything you do has to be scalable for everyone, everywhere else…”

For Rushkoff, it’s an issue of sustainability not scale:

…and the fact that it doesn’t scale really doesn’t matter because your not, this is not a business plan... it doesn’t have to keep growing… all you need to do is to sustain and in order to sustain you just get to the point that works and then you’re there right and then people can either borrow, you know borrow hopefully the sort of the more fundamental decisions you’ve made or choices you’ve made rather than the specific choices of praxis that you’ve made.

So what would highly sustainable learning look like? By all means borrow those "fundamental decisions", but lay off best praxis. I'm reminded of Dave Snowden's advice when asked how he would sustain and scale successful ICT practice in schools:

It's not so much about repeating a success as repeating the conditions which led to that success. In any complex system you can never replicate outcome, but you can replicate starting conditions. Maybe part of the problem of scale and replication is a consequence of a failure to recognise this basic fact. In a sense you want multiple diverse initiatives to emerge, and you want to measure their impact on the social and educational fabric not a series of pre-determined targeted outcomes.

Back to the online panel and fast forward to 1:16:00 where Mark Nicols observes that education can be thought of as just this sort of complex problem or social mess. After which Leigh responds by calling for space for new ways of working, free from industrial scale systems.

In a "too big to fail" economy that Rushkoff describes as "about neutralising the small and encouraging the big" we can help build a diverse and more resiliant learning eco-system that is too small to fail. Simply by answering Leigh's call and encouraging the small numbers of people who are finding new ways of working we can invent highly sustainable learning.