Dear Folks,
I would like to encourage the development of an interactive, collaborative learning / teaching community thru the medium of the PuttingZone website and this Flatstick Forum. Let me explain a bit what I mean by that.
A collaborative community is a nexus for the exchange of information and ideas, and as such is the nurturing ground for innovation and advances of knowledge. A collaborative community is basically a collective brain with a memory, and the brain is engaged and perhaps even proactively so.
The PuttingZone, seen in its present state, can be viewed as a specific embodiment of knowledge about putting. The PuttingZone is somewhat changing and growing, but it can be much more. If the PuttingZone becomes a true collaborative community, then it will be very dynamic and its accretions of real knowledge can become rapid and perhaps even astonishing in breadth and depth.
The trick to a collaborative community is to establish a stable core and structure that welcomes without judgment a vibrant exchange of views and voices in the context of a developing collective consensus of what is seimnal and what is irrelevant.
I think I can play the role of "core" and that I can establish an appropriate "structure" to facilitate the exchange of views and some winnowing and memorializing process guided by collective judgment of the community. With that core and structure in place, the vibrancy of the community becomes a function of the energy, diversity, and collective IQ of specific participants.
The model is not the "design by committee" approach, but more the "survival of good ideas in the jungle marketplace of ideas." This approach requires balancing vigor, tolerance, rigorous honesty, and mutually respectful civility and perhaps a sense of comradeship in the enterprise. I think this "free giving in exchange for free giving back of improvements" is the pattern of successful collaboration behind the development of the Linux operating system, for example.
The Internet certainly makes this sort of community possible, in ways not heretofore sustainable.
To begin this community, I would propose creating a class of willing participants called "Citizens" or "Contributors" or something like that. People who might like to participate in this sort of community may simply email me at
geoff@puttingzone.com and we'll get started.
This is the same basic idea underlying "neural networks" and artificial self-learning systems. I'm sure it will be a real blast and will also be productive.
Here is a pretty suggestive description of what's entailed in a Collaborative Community:
A Learning Community can articulate its experience; identify the consequences; critique the experiences; adapt its behaviour; and carry new knowledge / practices / rituals / symbols / traditions into the future; knowing its history.
Values of a Learning Community
1. Realising a future
2. External orientation
3. Proactive and Responsive
4. Power sharing / Information sharing
5. Commitment
6. Openness & Trust
7. Competency
8. Accountability
Why do we need Learning Communities?
* Pace of Change
* Greater Complexity in Society
* Increasing Information and the need to handle this
* Loss of Community History and Wisdom
* Generational differences
* Multi-cultural society
What inhibits Community Learning?
* Isolation of participants and isolation from the wider society
* Vertical hierarchies
* Crisis bouncing (decreased resources - energy / space / etc )
* Too much focus on process rather than outcomes
* Reluctance to training, learning, new behaviours
* Control and maintenance
* Advocacy - too much trying to win arguments
* Poor listening skills
* Lack of safe space for dialogue
What I have in mind is something related to "collaborative learning" among groups of students responsible for teaching themselves under the facilitation of a teacher-guide as discussed in this
Study but not confined in that academic context of teacher-student with set material to be ingested. Instead, I have in mind more a distributed parallel network of co-equal channels of information that focus the knowledge with critical thinking in a collective way. There is a
distinction between "collaborative learning" and "cooperative learning," but I'm not sure it's too meaningful for the community I am envisioning.
There will have to be some limits on the size of the community, so that all participants can contribute freely, and there will also have to be some management of the communication process to preclude over-dominance by the loudest or the longest communicators and certain etiquette rules about listening patiently to and fully considering the views of others. With a common goal of advancing the knowledge and teaching and performance of putting, we ought to be able to roll the rock pretty far uphill together.
The future in golf instruction is teams, not hotdogs.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
Geoff Mangum's PuttingZone
Golf's most advanced and comprehensive putting instruction.
Over 935,000 visits and growing strong ...
518 Woodlawn Ave
Greensboro NC 27401
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geoff@puttingzone.com
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