we make the road by walking

This is the title of a book published in 1990, transcribing a series of conversations between radical educators Myles Horton and Paolo Friere in 1987. The phrase Freire is quoting is from a poem about pilgrimage by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado. The key ideas in this poem are that the road is made, or emerges, as we walk it, and its impermanence that it disappears as we move on. See Caminante, no hay camino for a brief discussion of the ideas in this poem.

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Horton and Friere are trying to figure out why they are trying to work together, to bring their ideas and histories together. At least one reason is that they are aware that future educators who come across some part of their work may also find it helpful to know about how they each worked things out for themselves, and that one way they can do this is by interviewing each other.

MYLES: Well now, when we talk about this kind of background, it's mainly the things that would help people understand where I come from in terms of my ideas and my thinking, what they are rooted in. Is that the idea?
PAOLO: Yes. Everything you recognise as something important. I think even though we need to have some outline I am sure that we make the road by walking. It has to do with this house, with this experience here. You're saying that in order to start, it should be necessary to start.
MYLES: I've never figured out any other way to start.
PAOLO: The question for me is now is it possible for us, in the process of making the road, to be clear and to clarify our own making of the road. That is, then to clarify some theoretical issues about education in the big vision of education. It's necessary. But I am not worried not to have now the list of these issues because I think that they will come out of the conversations.

In a 2014 blog article Kate Bowles wrote a reply to Mike Caulfield about how we learn about environments by actively navigating through them, rather than simply by obtaining a personal copy of the content in them. In other words, learners learn by being given the time to explore and perhaps become productively lost. Time spent going in circles is time well spent.

Making the road by walking is a concept that is helpful in thinking about the design of learning environments that foster curiosity and enable people to make their own paths through them rather than following those laid down by the intention of the designer. The changes that take place may be Discoverable but not Obvious, but are not of immediate importance.

These notions seem to relate to the experience in Fedwiki in two ways.

First, the idea of the emergent path may require an understanding of knowledge as more liquid than we are usually accustomed to think, since a static personal copy of any specific page is swiftly superseded (if it is of interest to others).

Second, the idea of the impermanence of the path we tread is important, there is a continuous movement forward that seems to characterise the Fedwiki space. Pages float up like thought balloons, some are carried away on the wind (those pages from Within a Week with no twins), some are added to and slowly grow. Others are recycled, and shift and change kaleidoscopically, and different versions are like shifting perspectives. But the liquidity of the space is a challenge.

How do we manage this? Are we developing strategies for Coping with liquidity?