A great and detailed summary of the book by Karen Ferreira-Meyers, describing each chapter in turn as well as providing some useful commentary on it.
She notes that we show an American/Western bias, visibly in our choice of tools and exemplars: this point is well taken. In retrospect it is odd that we barely mention tools used by a sizable portion of the world’s population. But there is more to our selective blindness than just unwittingly ignoring the tools and populations that use them. There is at least another book to be written (likely not by us though it would be a great project) on the cultural differences between social learning in different parts of the world. Different cultures have very different understandings of the roles of others in learning, from collectivist cultures that make a big thing of respect for hierarchies to those that see little value in individual learning unless all benefit from it, not to mention the networked individualism that characterizes much of Western culture. The great thing about the ways that crowds can come together through the Internet is that such things can be made more visible and are more easily explored, as long as we can keep out of the echo chambers and filter bubbles that threaten to separate us, as long as we can recognize the enormous value of diversity and, above all, as long as we can celebrate the humanity that binds us all.
