Want to learn where a faster, wireless internet and robust web technology is moving all of us? Read Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything to get a real-world understanding of the impact of YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, Linux, SecondLife and InnoCentive.
This is a true paradigm shift. Changes have occurred in business and society regarding mass collaboration and the internet. I know many people do not like change but we live in exciting new times.
How has technology transformed our world? Consider ABC Television has been around for almost 60 years. The first television broadcast was in 1948. If you total all the video (24/7) shown on ABC since 1948 — just over 500,000 hours. YouTube has produced more hours of content in just the past 6 months.
The colonial era approach to education will never should not be continued. When will our educational systems catch up with the world? The longer we stand on the sidelines and watch countries including India and China establish educational models around the internet-enabled world, the longer our students will not be able to compete when they enter the global marketplace.
Some states are making that change. Michigan’s virtual schools permit students to study the Chinese language via the internet. Their instructor lives in China. It started when choices for foreign language were no longer acceptable. What economic impact does French or German have in contrast to Chinese and Hindi for a student’s future? Its safe to say French economic power has been on the decline since World War I. Lets give our students the best opportunities to succeed in our country’s future.
In higher education there are examples of how ideas fall short. Teacher are often unaware of how to get their students to connect their idea/project with a engineer, on-demand book publisher or patent attorney in today’s global marketplace. Yes patent attorney. But it may be due to the colonial era approach to educational reform. Too often educators look inward (or to peer groups) and believe if they change internal measurements, students will benefit. Wikinomics proves this to be another colonial era step in the wrong direction.
The world is a fast changing place. Skill-sets needed today in schools are not the same from just ten years ago. We may actually be failing our students by not taking them the full ten yards in the digital, global world. Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century clearly pointed out how a high school student with a laptop in Europe can become the new source of ideas. That individual anywhere around the world is connected and is becoming part of the business conversations and solutions.
Wikinomics has inspired me to move towards being a part of the New Alexandrians and contribute to new conversations focused around Ideagoras (via BusinessWeek) in the new, open, global, always-on idea marketplace.
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[…] Took Big to Know reveals in chapter eight how we are managed today. In the past we learned about Jack Welch of GE. He was the final, top decision maker for his company. But today with wikis, blogs and mobile technology GE’s strategic plans are made from the bottom up: “The CEO of General Electric could be entirely off the grid, but still GE’s engineers, product managers, and marketing folks are out on the Net, exploring and trying out the ideas that affect their branch of the larger decision tree.” Its the Wikipedia approach to business today. And this is also something Weinberger acknowledges in Don Tapscott’s work Wikinomics. […]