Rhizomatic Learning in an Arboreal Structure?

How do students learn these days?

Yes, government-developed curricular content is delivered through formal educational systems, but students are also -- and, arguably, more significantly for their futures -- engaged in social, Web 2.0, or "read/write web" learning.  Want to learn something today?  See if there's a how-to video on YouTube, join a blog on the topic to tap into an existing community of knowledge, or create a Facebook group and wait for the information you need to cluster around you.  This type of learning is significant at present, but it can only become more significant in the future.  Are we adequately preparing our students of the present for this future?  

I think the problem that education systems have with this new way of learning is that it conflicts with the way they work at a systematic, structural level.  Governments and education systems run in a top-down, hierarchical way that is very different from this "networked web node" way.  Thinking of this reminds me of one of the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, namely, A Thousand Plateaus from their Capitalism and Schizophrenia Project.

Here they contrast the "Arboreal," or tree-like structure, of some systems to the "Rhizomatic," or web-like structure, of others.  Sound familiar?  Maybe we need to  implement a new (ie: level, networked, nodal) structure for education systems themselves before we can expect to see a lot of support for learning in a Web 2.0 way.

If, as Glynis Cousin argues in Learning from Cyberspace,  "the medium is the pedagogy" (117), then maybe we need to pay serious attention to how we teach instead of (or at least as well as) what we teach...