One complaint I’ve always had about the edupunk and connected learning movements is how much darn work they require, which seems bound to leave a lot of people out or behind. Fundamentally, these successes aren’t shareable (go ahead, try and share your personal learning network with me), and so resist the kind of remixable refinement and elaboration that seems to be the engine of the age. The metaphor of rhizomatic learning emphasizes how resilient these sorts of things are supposed to be, but in technology circles we have a word for solutions so idiosyncratic they can’t work for many cases: brittle.

I recognize that there’s a sense in which this is a feature, not a bug. Freedom, sense-making, my answer is not yours, andsoforth. But this is the problem we keep returning to: solutions designed for autodidacts are too narrow, especially if to your autodidacticism you need to add a little technical muscle.

There has to be a better way, a more gentle on-ramp. A way to support personal learning networks (lowercase deliberate) above and beyond simply opening up the freedom to do so. Had we but world enough, and time …

No, social networks haven’t really gotten us there. Some tools have pressed on these issues — delicious, say, or diigo, scoopit, etc., while there are a variety of semantic web efforts that show an architecture that could build to this kind of result — but in unsatisfactory or merely aspirational ways. Still too much fussing, too little recognition of the different sorts of relationships that can be valuable, and with connections that are hard to see and easy to break. The successes will remain niche until we have some interface, some thin but essential layer for stitching together and visualizing such a network.

There’s been enough talk. We need some making here.