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Nightingale’s famous “coxcomb” chart from 1858 demonstrated that improving hygiene in British military hospitals slashed mortality rates. She said its design was intended “to affect thro’ the eyes what we fail to convey to the public through their word-proof ears.”

Twenty years later his word-proof students would get something altogether more dynamic than Nightingale’s pie charts to demystify global socioeconomic trends.

“It was a conscious intent to make the data look alive,”

“Statistics constitute a bulk of information that is surprisingly badly organised,”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation demands that every research project it funds has to make its full data set freely available, like open-source software code.”

“While nothing now can stop the surge to 9 billion, if the poorest 2 billion get improved child survival and the ability to buy bicycles and mobile phones, population growth will stop.

Yet while networked communications and marketplace experiments add useful information, breakthrough ideas still come from individuals, not committees.

There is nothing democratic about innovation,” says Paul Saffo, a veteran technology forecaster in Silicon Valley. “It is always an elite activity, whether by a recognized or unrecognized elite.”

Apple’s physical world is far different from Google’s realm of Internet software, where writing a few lines of new code can change a product instantly.

Apple product designs may not be determined by traditional market research, focus groups or online experiments. But its top leaders, recruited by Mr. Jobs, are tireless seekers in an information-gathering network on subjects ranging from microchip technology to popular culture. “It’s a lot of data crunched in a nonlinear way in the right brain,”

many businesses are now finding that the pace of change demanded by the global economy and facilitated by various technologies is requiring them to rethink how they are organized. Many are restructuring themselves as learning organizations—organizations in which new learning and innovation are the engines that drive the company.

Knowledge Forum is, of course, not the only online learning environment available. Others of note include FirstClass, WebCT, and Blackboard. Palloff and Pratt (2001) note that, whatever online environment is used, "attention needs to be paid to developing a sense of community in the group of participants in order for the learning process to be successful"

How does it work? In practice, the teacher presents students with a problem of understanding relevant to the real world. It could be a question such as What is the nature of light? or What makes a society a civilization? The focus here is to make student ideas, rather than predetermined activities or units of knowledge, the center of the classroom work. The next step is to get the students to generate ideas about the topic and write notes about their ideas in the Knowledge Forum (KF) database, an online environment with metacognitive enhancements to support the growth of the knowledge-building process. In generating these ideas, the students form work groups around similar interests and topics they wish to explore. These groups are  self-organized and dynamic; the teacher does not select the members, and members can join or leave as they choose. Idea generation can take place during these group sessions, during which all students are given the chance to express their ideas, or in individual notes posted directly to the KF database. While in a typical classroom setting ideas or comments generated in discussion are usually lost, the KF database preserves these ephemeral resources so that students can return to them for comment and reflection. Students are then encouraged to read the notes of other students and soon find that there are differing schools of opinion about the problem. The teacher's job is to ensure that students remain on task and work towards the solution of the problem under study by reading each other's notes and contributing new information or theories to the database

Are we moving toward an acceptance of superficiality as a replacement for deep learning? Has our multiple choice  culture trained our brains to believe that innovation is the holy grail?

I believe Personal Learning Networks are one of the three prongs necessary to be a do it yourself learner in today’s world.