Reflections on the future development of the internet as a zone of engagement as Web technologies mature, mobile access becomes dominant and new devices allow us to consume, learn, create and share with each other.
The Renaissance we are most familiar with started in the 14th Century and continued its trail of disruption for hundreds of years affecting language, art, design, understanding, belief, fashion, celebrity, politics and brought with it recognition for new types of talent and refinement of skill. It affected the lives of everyone in Europe at the time, although many argue that its affects were felt worldwide in connected nations.
I would argue that we are experience a second Renaissance now, a digital one - if you take the time to explore the 14thC renaissance and research the documented writings and musings of the time, as well as reflective tomes, you will be able to find comparable stories being written now, by many people of all walks of life - from the academics to the tribes in Africa, photographing their land and borders for Google.
This is not the place to explore in details those comparisons, but you might like to go off and have a bit of a play in your own time and come to your own conclusions, there is possibly several lifetimes of research out there already! However, for the purpose of this piece, I wanted to just set the scene as I see it.
For me, the two greatest things the internet brings to the foreseeable future, are the connectivity of people regardless of physical boundaries: be that land or capability; and the possibility for peer-to-peer learning, the disruption in education will be profound and seismic in its affect. Indeed these two things are one, the connectivity of people enables this worldwide education revolution, regardless of physical boundary.
And it is through education that we grow as a society. Take Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society (available here for free), written in the 70s with a kind of hippy/weirdo dream of what it would be like if we could disestablish schools, it was seen as a great but impossible work - even though the rhetoric made sense, in theory. I would argue that we have pretty much stumbled upon the environment he predicted we needed in order to free the minds and talents of the young. He says at one point:
Such criticism leads many people to ask whether it is possible to conceive of a different style of learning. The same people, paradoxically, when pressed to specify how they acquired what they know and value, will readily admit that they learned it more often outside than inside school. Their knowledge of facts, their understanding of life and work came to them from friendship or love, while viewing TV, or while reading, from examples of peers or the challenge of a street encounter. Or they may have learned what they know through the apprenticeship ritual for admission to a street gang or the initiation to a hospital, newspaper city room, plumber's shop, or insurance office. The alternative to dependence on schools is not the use of public resources for some new device which "makes" people learn; rather it is the creation of a new style of educational relationship between man and his environment. To foster this style, attitudes toward growing up, the tools available for learning, and the quality and structure of daily life will have to change concurrently.
It seems to me that we have already stumbled upon this reality, and it is because of this ability to learn directly from living scholars, as well as discover new things from long dead people within minutes and without moving - discovering as we go whole new communities of people who are experts and passionate in subjects we newly discover, willing to share their learnings and encourage ours.
Children are growing up in this world gripped by change, and their expectations are mighty. Open data, open borders, open source - IP wars are faintly ridiculous to them and they simply cannot understand why governments and organisations would not publish information in an open format or use open source tools and materials. Open learning is perhaps still a doodle on someone's iPad, although Khan Academy may beg to differ, and the Open University might pull me up a bit, but I mean open learning for schools, throughout education.
I believe that this is the real reason why it is so hard for anyone to really tackle the issue of teaching children how to program in schools. Everyone knows it is an issue, everyone knows that there is little that can be done with it within the current structure of education: teacher imparts expert knowledge to child, child learns in classroom, homework is done at home to reinforce classroom learning.
The teachers in the classroom cannot hope, nor do they want, to keep up with the relentless march of technology and skills associated. There is so much available for free and or structured online that really the only way to get the children coding is for them to learn outside the classrom, then use the physical space to share knowledge and solve challenges together, the teacher becoming the curator of the room, not the fountain of knowledge.
But this is not only true for computer science. It is true for History, Physics, Maths, Art every subject you can think of - the tools for learning, and the coommunities and experts are there for everyone in the digital space, regardless of location, borders, abilities - if we truly solve this problem for computer science, we start to pull the thread of education and then it gets interesting.
The future of the classroom is a physical space to share knowledge learned through curiosity and networks/experts online, the future of learning is through peer-to-peer, with children becoming experts in subjects we have not even yet thought of, and sharing that knowledge with each other, across borders and maybe, who knows, across time.
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