When we conceive of learner as knowmad, the traditional roles assigned to teacher and student become less relevant, necessary, and linear.  The knowmad is mobile and learns with anybody, anywhere, anytime.  As such, the place we now know as school may be too small and perhaps unable to contain the range of learning engagements necessary for those with nomadic tendencies.  Rather, think of the extended community--one that is physical, virtual, and blended-- as potential learning spaces that our knowmadic traveler composes, accesses, participates in, abandons, and changes.

In the pre-in­dus­trial age, no­mads were peo­ple that moved with their liveli­hood (usu­ally an­i­mal herd­ing) in­stead of set­tling at a sin­gle lo­ca­tion. In­dus­tri­al­iza­tion forced the set­tle­ment of many no­madic peo­ples… …but, some­thing new is emerg­ing in the 21st cen­tury: Know­mads. A know­mad is what I term a no­madic knowl­edge worker -that is, a cre­ative, imag­i­na­tive, and in­no­v­a­tive per­son who can work with al­most any­body, any­time, and any­where. In­dus­trial so­ci­ety is giv­ing way to knowl­edge and in­no­va­tion work.

Here are seven qual­i­ties that I con­sider essen­tial to the iden­tity of open source, con­trasted with the diluted forms they com­monly assume.

the necessary ingredients for a MOOC:  Knowledge or the opposite of knowledge: a question to which you don't have an answer, but that you'd like to have answered. People to serve as facilitators. A digital infrastructure.

There is a fascinating distributed dialogue about the nature of instructional scaffolding, the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and how they can be viewed in the domain of today's learning landscapes.