A Perfect Storm

…is how Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams describe mass collaboration and the new Web.

(Update: Published this post and then came across this post by Will Richardson moments later in my bloglines feeds)

This week I wrote about Wikinomics and the Fates of Human Societies and Miguel added much more to the discussion with the conclusion that our education system — like human societies in the past — is in danger of disappearing. I think he’s right — and — I think it needs to disappear and be replaced by a new system that works for our students today. And this needs to happen NOW.

Last night I continued reading Wikinomics — I’m reading this slowly because I’m also filtering all of it through the “how does this apply to what I’m doing everyday” filter. I’m also having trouble sleeping with all of these thoughts running through my head.

Here are just some snippets from page 31 of the book:

…the organizational values, skills, tools, processes, and architectures of the ebbing command-and-control economy are not simply outdated; they are handicaps on the value creation process… the old hierarchical ways of organizing work and innovation do not afford the level of agility, creativity, and connectivity that companies require to remain competitive in today’s environment…

…Changes of this magnitude have occurred before. In fact, human societies have always been punctuated by periods of great change that not only causes people to think and behave differently, but also give rise to new social orders and institutions… changes are driven by disruptive technologies, such as the printing press, the automobile, and the telephone, that penetrate societies to fundamentally change their culture and economy…

The new Web…is the most robust platform yet for facilitating and accelerating new creative disruptions. People, knowledge, objects, devices, and intelligent agents are converging in many-to-many networks where new innovations and social trends spread with viral intensity…

The old, hardwired “plan and push” mentality is rapidly giving way to a new, dynamic “engage and co-create” economy… The speed and scope of change is intensifying… a perfect storm is gathering force and shipwrecking the old corporation in wave after wave of change.

And — on page 33 the authors state –

To succeed in this new world, it will not be enough — indeed, it will be counterproductive — simply to intensify current policies, management strategies, and curricular approaches.

Read that sentence again and then consider the current policy discussions around testing, accountability, standards, and school reform — discussions that rarely address the technology integration issue, and when they do it’s rarely on the level of what Tapscott and Williams are describing in Wikinomics.

In the second chapter they go on to discuss this current generation of students and how they are interacting natively with the new Web — and how this gives this group of young people certain expectations about how the world should work. Previous generations have been passive receptors or consumers of media while this generation are active participants in the creation of media and knowledge. And they expect active participation everywhere, all of the time.

And we wonder why they are bored in our classrooms?

I’m beginning to strongly believe that if our education system doesn’t change it will perish — and it will be replaced by a networked system of learning that these students will create. We haven’t yet seen the magnitude of what these students will do when they are truly out in the world in force.

Do we really believe that they will enter our current education systems as teachers? No, they won’t. They’ll opt out of our rigid, bureaucratic system and develop new systems that work better for students of the 21st century — and they won’t be hindered by outmoded beliefs about fundamental and scared “Saber-Tooth Curricula.” We think we have teacher-shortages and retention problems now? Just wait.

Just as these students will transform the corporation (according to Tapscott and Wiliams), so too will they transform education — in ways that we can’t even begin to imagine — especially if we fail to transform it ourselves.

Technorati Tags: Anthony Williams, change, Don Tapscott, education, learning, Miguel Guhlin, teaching, Web2.0, Wikinomics

Change Agency by Stephanie Sandifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may copy, distribute, transmit and/or remix this content for noncommercial uses as long as you attribute the work to Stephanie Sandifer (with link back to the original post) and agree to license the work under the same or similar license.