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Scaffolding Bold Moves
So a few more pundits are starting to weigh in on the Ford Bold Moves campaign that I’m collaborating on, and those opinions have a lot of different view points of what it could or should be. While I don’t speak for the campaign or for Ford, I’ve got my own ideas of theories behind what we’re trying accomplish (and that I started to touch on last week.)
In one sense, I find myself thinking a lot about processes and journeys, learning and transformation. I’m reminded of some of the educational theory courses I took back in the dark ages, especially of the work of Lev Vygotsky [wiki]. He was writing about childhood learning and development, but in a way learning has become a lifelong survival trait in the modern age. I wonder how many of his theories apply to the conversations and risk taking and learning of the Web.
For example, Vygotsky was fascinated by the concept of “zones of proximal development” - for him, the difference between what a child could accomplish on their own and what they could accomplish under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. That zone is about learning that is “just out of reach” rather than what has already been learned. That process of providing that collaboration or guidance was called “scaffolding” in Vygotsky’s theories.
I’m certainly not the first person to ponder these thoughts: if you dig into the conceptual descendants of Vygotsky’s work you find things like “activity theory” as applied to information systems or conceptual frameworks like “distributed cognition“. At the core, though, is probably also a lesson about the nature of collaboration and creation in the digital age. Part of what makes bloggers bloggers could be attributed to activity theory: the process of learning from doing in collaboration with people that help scaffold your learning process. Scaffolds fall away as you learn to do it more and more yourself: in fact, you probably start serving as a scaffold for others who are learning by doing. Sometimes you hear the phrase “cognitive apprenticeships” used to describe this as well.
What does all of this have to do with marketing or even Ford Bold Moves? Welcome to my personal zone of proximal development: those are the questions I’m pondering. I’m not sure I have the answers yet, but I’m confronted with the realization that maybe many of us on the Web have missed out on thinking of ourselves as involved in a process rather than just creating products and artifacts. The journey might be even more important than the original destination.
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