Failure is free, high-quality research, offering direct evidence of what works and what doesn’t. Cheap failure, valuable as it is on its own, is also a key part of a more complex advantage: the exploration of multiple possibilities. (pp. 236, 247)

• In what ways can we make positive, learning experiences out of our students’ failures and why would we want to?
• Describe one of your recent failures (if you’ve had any).
• What did you learn from failing?

It is this gap that distributed exploration takes advantage of: in a world where anyone can try anything, even the risky stuff can be tried eventually. If a large enough population of users is trying things, then the happy accidents have a much higher chance of being discovered. (p. 249)

• What kind of environment must we foster such that "happy accidents" might be discovered?
• In such an environment, how is failure viewed?
  

Reference:

• Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody. New York: The Penguin Press.
  

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