Recovering from past histories

There's lots of past experiences that can make people convinced they are incapable of learning on their own (DIY with a PLE) or even learning from communities and collaborations (DIT). Here's four ways that past history can incapacitate learning which are all too common:

• Internalizing the voice of a severe inner critic from parental control freaks, perfectionists or child abusers.
• Enduring chronic anxiety from previous frightening experiences that continue to reoccur and attract threats of even worse incidents.
• Failing at early learning challenges, tests and proofs of capabilities that becomes a rigid identity, fact of life and accepted curse of fate.
• Adapting to pressures from parents and teachers to be talented in ways where there's no acceptable excuse for inevitable difficulties, setbacks or mistakes.

Problems like these appear to require professional therapists or licensed counselors. These challenges do not seem to be within the scope of PLE 2.0 with the beneficial effects of a DIT component. A large consensus assumes that the change will be costly, time consuming and repugnant to most "damaged learners". Recovery from past history would seem miraculous, exceptional and impossible to replicate.

However, there's a another way to frame this challenge of recovering from past history. Does it take a panel of paid experts to create an up-to-date encyclopedia? Can Lego only develop new products that sell like crazy with internal design engineers? Can a new PC/Workstation operating system only be created, upgraded and debugged by salaried programmers on the payroll of Oracle, Cisco or Microsoft? The answer is no to each of these questions. Perhaps the recovery from past history can get handled like every open source project and peer-to-peer collaboration. Recent books are filled with examples of solutions that emerged from voluntary collaborations:

Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything / Don Tapscott
Outside Innovation - How Your Customers Will Co-design Your Company's Future / Patricia Seybold
Crowdsourcing : why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business / Jeff Howe

Another source of inspiration for this possibility is an inspiring book about therapy with children: Magical Moments of Change - How Psychotherapy Turns Kids Around / Lenore Terr. None of the delightful transformations of these kids followed a treatment plan or regimen. Each experienced moments when the time was right and something spontaneous occurred between them. The history between them made it possible to offer something unexpected and respond in kind. The prior history of the child fell away and no longer defined identity, apprehensions or conduct.

In all four books, the delightful outcomes emerge from improvisation and spontaneous collaborations. The chemistry in the combination of people takes over. There is some structure, expectations and defined roles, but not controls or imposed abuses of power. This suggests that adding a Do-It-Together component to PLE 2.0 can spawn unpredictable recoveries from debilitating past histories.