FLOSSE Posse: Interview with Stephen Downes

Brain-tickling thoughts from Stephen Downes. I believe people like Downes are redefining certain key concepts that have a big impact on education generally, not just online learning.
FLOSSE Posse:

'The greatest non-technical issue is the mindset. We have to view information as a flow rather than as a thing. Online learning is a flow. It's like electricity or water. It's there, it's available and it flows. It's not stuff you collect. I don't see myself sitting in my home collecting jars of water. I use the water as it comes. If you think the internet as an environment that is moving and shaping all around you, then you will have a better attitude to be able to handle the flood of information that is coming at you'
and
We have this picture of a community that’s comes from people like Edgian Wenger, John Hagel III and Arthur G. Armstrong, that community is some sort of discreet entity, like a pre-Wittgensteinian definition where you have clear boundaries and you know whether or not you are in a community. But the concept of community that evolves out the capacity to exercise choise in joining or not joining a community now becomes fuzzy, it becomes something like a family resemblence. A community just becomes a vaguely defined cloud of clustered interactions that emerge from the center of individual actions. We have folksonomies, so we’ll have folksmunities