Getting Smarter Faster

We thus do not yet have any good idea 

of what cannot be done by connected humans 

when working at the scale of the Net.*

Sure would be nice to be able to broadcast to the world “Here’s a description of my precious little girl. She wants to live a life without limits.** We’re looking for knowledge and related resources we can use.” -- and to have what she needs come streamin’ in: automatically, continuously, and right on target.

What kinds of knowledge and resources? Well, answers to all the questions I have in mind to ask; ideas and information that hadn't previously occurred to me to look for; opportunities to collaborate with others to create new knowledge...

I want my daughter to be an epicenter for these heady things. 

I’ve read enough books filled with enough accounts of effective, real-world "pulling" to believe she could be. Here's a wee bit about three (3) such books worth noting as they relate to our discussion:

• Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business [2009] by David Siegel. The so-called semantic web is “a new way of packaging information to make it much more useful and reusable.” It represents a vision (at this point) of what the Net could become, i.e., an extremely powerful tool for getting what we need when we need it.

• Too Big To Know [2011] by David Weinberger. Everything you ever wanted to know about knowledge in our new networked world. Among many other things pull-related, Mr. Weinberger writes thoughtfully about strategies for filtering knowledge (forward) in order to successfully keep on keepin’ on. 

• The Power of Pull [2010] by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. About ways individuals, teams and other groups are using pull techniques to their advantage. I’m most interested in what they have to say about "shaping strategies," which have to do with motivating big groups of people and institutions to work together to solve problems.

The notion that we can use the Net to perform better -- i.e., be more efficient, learn faster, and have greater impact -- runs through each book. Hagel, Brown and Davison, in particular, talk in terms of “increasing the rate at which we can improve performance.”

How might "performance" enter in when we're talking about CP? In countless ways, I'm sure, but what matters most is how well our kids are performing.

I wonder: 

• Can we use the Net to help more kids with CP achieve more than anyone's ever dreamed possible?

• How quickly can we get to the point where we’re laughing at the very things that are limiting our kids today? 

• Could it be that what holds our kids back the most are our limited capacities as adults to learn and imagine better ways of doing things?

*from Too Big To Know
** "For people with a spectrum of disabilities, life should be without limits" comes from United Cerebral Palsy (UCP).