Sebastian begins by wondering if the usual educational assumption that learning is done to us by experts helps us become truly educated. He refers to some psychological theories of the 1950s that look to conversation as the way in which we build up an understanding of our self and world. (Sorry to be vague but I had a little incident and had to reboot.) Could conversation, he wonders, be a key to education?

Now he makes the transition to web publishing and weblogs as a “conversational learning tool.” These give us the ability to reflect upon our public representations. There isn’t a lot of data about this yet, he says. Think of personal web publishing networks as “conversational learning environments for self-organized learners.”

[Cool idea. And I like the recasting of education as conversation. Of course.]

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