Learning in a Time of Abundance: The Community Is the Curriculum, by Dave Cormier (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024)

In this easy-to-read text, Dave Cormier romps through a spectrum of ideas, behaviours, and customs that are changing as we transition from a world of information scarcity to one of information abundance.What makes the book shine and distinguishes it from more serious academic texts is Cormier's personality.His quirky insights come in sidelines and examples that make even a serious and sometimes grumpy book reviewer smile.For example, using a marketing campaign for an imaginary Internet-based cupcake company, he states that people under the age of 45 are most likely to buy cupcakes online-he then qualifies this assertion by noting that he has "no idea if this is true, but you probably don't know either" (p.82).Rather than beginning with the conventional idea that education creates or at least generates learning, Cormier argues that formal education has attempted to fundamentally define what learning is and how it is to be measured.This is true, even as most of us (teachers included) have many different ideas what learning is.Is it about attitudes, facts remembered, procedures memorised, tricks mastered, knowing what to avoid, the ability to get along or lead others, or more?For the last two centuries formal education has had a monopoly on learning and has built structured systems to assess and reward certain types of learning.But all of these systems were built during an era of information scarcity and one devoid of AI-derived answers."That time has come" (p.21).Cormier argues that education, as a social system, evolved in an era of information scarcity-and those days are long gone.This is not an academic tome-at one point he decries as a form of backward thinking the necessity to show that all claims in the book are cited-as if citing previous work offers only a guarantee of unoriginality.This is just one example where Cormier picks at a contradiction in our fractured information context, but ironically his comment seems contradicted when he later talks about the need for developing trusted sources of information.But this is not a fatal error; his provocative examples serve to reinforce the notion that information abundance rarely delivers certainty and that living with a healthy level of uncertainty and doubt is perhaps the most important literacy for the 21 st century.The work covers viruses, intentional distortions, ghosting, the propensity we all see for disparaging and sarcastic comments, and a host of other concerns that arise when we put a printing press, with global distribution potential, in the hands of everyone.The world of abundance is not just a wealth of content to help us learn almost any conceivable topic but also an abundance of opinion, conspiracy theories, distortions, and untruths.Cormier shows with examples that we need new skills and theories to help us