Don Tapscott's Blog, page 50

Edge World Question Center Response: Designing Your Mind

What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

Given recent research about brain plasticity and the dangers of cognitive load, the most powerful tool in our cognitive arsenal may well be design.

Specifically, we can use design principles and discipline to shape our minds. This is different than learning and acquiring knowledge. It's about designing how each of us thinks, remembers and communicates — appropriately and effectively for the digital age.

Today's popular handwringing about its effects on cognition has some merit. But rather than predicting a dire future, perhaps we should be trying to achieve a new one.

Read my full response at the Edge World Question Center.

Top trends and developments for 2011

Thanks largely to the Internet, long-standing monopolies and power imbalances are being challenged as more people from more regions of the world connect, collaborate, and compete on the global stage. Young digital natives everywhere are questioning the historic traditions of venerable institutions such as the university, the newspaper, and the entire apparatus of representative government. The pace of this change is quickening, as we now operate on Internet time.

Below are the most important trends and developments I foresee in the coming year.  I welcome your comments. Do you agree with my forecast? What have I missed?

Rather than just an economic downturn, more people will recognize that we're at the beginning of something profound. The industrial economy and many of its institutions are reaching the end of their lifecycle— from newspapers and old models of financial services to our energy grid, transportation systems and institutions for global cooperation and problem solving.
The further rise of Global Risks.  We are moving into an age where profound threats are emerging to the global economy, society and even the very existence of humanity. Failure of the financial system, weapons of mass destruction, new communicable diseases, collapse of environmental systems, water security and many other threats make the world a volatile place.
Worldwide generational conflict will grow.  Around the planet young adults are asserting themselves in the workplace and in political arenas.  Protests against entrenched governments are increasing in frequency and severity.
Media upheaval will continue.  More of the music consumer's dollar will go into the pockets of artists and less to the music labels.  The industry will awaken to the need to sell music as a service rather than a product.  TV will continue down the path of becoming simply another app on the web.
Where traditional print newspapers continue to wither, innovative news ecosystems such as the Huffington Post are growing and will claim a larger percentage of the advertising dollar.  HuffPo has become an influential player in American business, political and social life.
We will see collapse of the app.  Rather than writing applications to run on separate mobile operating systems, developers will return to the uniformity of web sites accessed through browsers.
The Age of Hyper Transparency will arrive. Right now it's the US government, but Wikileaks founder Julian Assange says private-sector companies are next, starting with the financial services industry. So if your corporation is going to be naked – and you really have no choice in the matter – you'd better be buff.
There will be a social media privacy backlash. With the meteoric rise of social media, we are increasingly willing accomplices in undermining our own privacy rights. Privacy is the Achilles Heel of sites such as Facebook.
The battle over net neutrality will intensify. Internet Service Providers will continue their campaign to charge premium prices for certain kinds of content, while content providers will want all Internet traffic treated fairly.  The biggest confrontations will be in the wireless realm.
The interdependence of actions and events means we have no option other than to try to encourage and enforce mutual cooperation through a new division of labor among the four key pillars of society: business, government, the civic sector and a new pillar enabled by the Internet – the individual citizen.

Please share your thoughts.

A great economist reaches 100th birthday

Nobel prize-winning economist Ronald Coase has just celebrated his 100th birthday. Coase is a brilliant thinker and his insights were enormously influential on me and many of my colleagues.  His 1991 Nobel was "for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs … for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy."

The first time I heard Coase's name was from my colleague Riel Miller, who was working for the OECD in 1994.  He speculated that Coase and a paper he had written in the 1930s might be the key to understanding the Internet.  We had a number of discussions about Coase's work and I began to use his analytical framework in my own research and credit Coase's insights in almost every speech I gave.

Following is an excerpt from my 1995 book, The Digital Economy:

Theme 4:  Molecularization

•   The new economy is a molecular economy. The old corporation is being disaggregated, replaced by dynamic molecules and clusters of individuals and entities which form the basis of economic activity.  The organization does not necessarily disappear, but it is transformed.  "Mass" becomes "molecular" in all aspects of economic and social life.

The principal economic unit of the industrial economy was the corporation.  The command-and-control hierarchy found its roots in the church and military bureaucracies of the agricultural age but was extended to become the firm.  The objective of every CEO and board was to grow the corporation's size, revenue and profit.

The traditional hierarchy has been in deep trouble for years now because it was poorly equipped to respond to the new business needs.  Conventional wisdom of the last decade has called for more responsive, flatter, team based structures.  The most significant movement to create such horizontal, process-oriented structures is business process reengineering.

However, as Riel Miller, an economist working with the Alliance for Converging Technologies, put it:  "The necessity of adding knowledge at every step in the value chain is beginning to call into question the familiar notion of the firm as an organizational unit.  The Net may be, at one and the same time, the source of both the demise and salvation of the firm as we have known it."[i][i]

Over fifty years ago a famous economist, [Ronald] Coase, asked why firms exist.  Why are there groups of people working together under one organizational framework?  He wondered why there is no market within the firm.  Why is it unprofitable to have each worker, each step in the production process, become an independent buyer and seller?  Why doesn't the draftsperson auction their services to the engineer?  Why is it that the engineer does not sell designs to the highest bidder?

One of the main answers to these questions has to do with the cost of information.  Producing a loaf of bread, assembling a car or running a hospital emergency ward involves a number of steps where cooperation and common purpose are essential for a useful product.  An emergency room where each doctor bids for nursing services in an attempt to get the lowest price, while at the same time determining if the nurse is actually capable of assisting with the operation, might provide a fully functioning market but not a particularly useful product for a dead patient.  Similarly, holding an auction before the axle assembler would pass along product to the chassis assembler might slow down the line.  It would be even less efficient if the information on engineering viability and compatibility needed to be purchased on the shop-floor marketplace at every step.

What makes a pure market impractical is the time and cost of acquiring the information needed to undertake complex production processes.  What is being sold?  What is the quality of the labor?  What is the quality of the raw material or intermediate input?  What is the price for the final product?  How will it be sold?  By whom?  With what kind of information or marketing?  Who will finance the production process and how much will financing cost?  The ensemble of functions within a firm consist not only of a series of discrete products but also the infrastructure of collaboration.

A clear framework and strict regimentation worked on many battlefields and marketplaces of the past.  The role of the overarching infrastructure of the firm or army was clear and indivisible.  But today, as Miller puts it:  "The Net does not change the rules, but it changes what is possible.  It opens up new horizons for what is economically and practically feasible.  The costs of information and coordination are dropping.  More than ever we are in a position to create wealth by adding knowledge to each product at each step."

The industrial hierarchy and economy are giving away to molecular organizations and economic structures.  The word molecularization is awkward, but helpful.  In physics, a molecule is one of the basic elements of matter.  It is the smallest particle into which a substance can be divided and still have the chemical identity of the original substance.  Molecules can be held together by electrical forces.  In solids, attracting and repelling forces are balanced, holding the molecules in place.  The molecules do not have enough energy to move to another part of the solid.  In liquids, the molecules move about easily although they still have attractive forces between each other.  Certain organic compounds called liquid crystals have properties of both liquids and solids – molecules form clusters which can move about and change rapidly, yet they retain a degree of structure.  As conditions change (temperature), the state of the molecules changes as well.

The analogy is helpful in understanding the new economy.  The new enterprise has a molecular structure.  It is based on the individual.  The knowledge worker (human molecule) functions as a business unit of one.[ii][ii]  Motivated, self-learning, entrepreneurial workers empowered by and collaborating through new tools apply their knowledge and creativity to create value.  Conditions may warrant a solid structure – tightly binding molecules together.  More likely, conditions will require more dynamic relationships between molecules – causing them to cluster in teams like liquid crystals, or even to move more freely as in liquids.  The capacity for new relationships is profoundly increased through the new infostructure.  There is still a role for the organization to provide a base structure for such molecular activity, but it is a far cry from the old hierarchy.

When such molecular activity is extended to the economy as a whole, we can see very different kinds of relationships which make discussion of the virtual corporation seem trite.  For example, the mass media will become the molecular media, where readers, listeners, and viewers become customers able to access and interact with millions of "channels."  They do so when they choose, rather than according to the schedule of a broadcaster.  Mass production becomes molecular production with production runs of one – rather than one million – pairs of jeans.  Even products become composed of molecules which are link together through standard interfaces.  The software industry is becoming a parts industry where companies build and market parts which work with others.  Just as a modern wide-body jet is referred to in the industry as a "complex assembly of parts flying in close formation" because most of these parts are not manufactured by Boeing or Lockheed or McDonnell Douglas, but by their suppliers, mass marketing becomes molecular marketing as marketers identify specific customer groups or individuals to receive sales information.

[i][i] Thanks to Riel Miller for his insights on this section.

[ii][ii]    The first to introduce the  notion of a business unit of one were Stan David and Bill Davidson in "2020 Vision:  Transform your Business Today to Succeed in Tomorrow's Economy." Simon and Schuster, New York, 1991.  Subsequently Tom Peters has taken up the slogan in his "Tom Peters Seminars."

Big Idea from Dubai: A Global Risk Management Commons

One of the most important sessions at the Global Agenda Council Summit in Dubai addressed the issue of Managing Global Risks.  We are moving into an age where profound threats are emerging to the global economy, society and even the very existence of humanity.

Consider something as mundane as the supply chain.  Vast networks provide the world with food, clothing, fuel and other necessities.  One expert explained some scenarios where a breakdown in the supply chain could lead to huge social unrest and even a disintegration of civilized society.  Failure of the financial system, weapons of mass destruction, new communicable diseases, collapse of environmental systems, water security and 20 other topics make the world a volatile place subject to significant, and possibly catastrophic risks.

Many innovative ideas emerged to address this problem. For example one was to use the web to create a Global Risk Management Commons. Risk management in various sectors has tended to be proprietary, closed, short term and locked into organizational stovepipes. Why not apply the principles of transparency, sharing intellectual property, interdependence and collaboration to make a significant proportion of "risk management" a public good.

This "Linux of global risk management," would be part database, and part collaborative platform.  The database should be a living, evolving source of information, knowledge, scenarios, models, best practices and linkages to various risk categories.  The platform would enable communities of practice for human dialogue, simulation, contingency planning, crisis response and overall collaboration.

For me it underlined that this is a time of great change, and new approaches to solving global problems.  This idea and dozens like it did not come from the UN, The G20 or other formal institutions of global cooperation.  It came from a new kind of multi-stakeholder network.

Now the challenge is to execute.

New realities and new risks

I'm enjoying participating in the meeting of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Councils in Dubai.  It goes without saying that the world is a very volatile place and this is a great time of change. There are countless new risks coming from unpredictable places and the old rules and mechanisms for global cooperation and problem solving are not up to the challenge.

Many economists are warning us to buckle down for a period of prolonged sluggishness, reminiscent of Japan's lost decade or the Swedish crisis of 1992. But evidence is mounting that the current global slump is not just cyclical, but rather symptomatic of a deeper secular change. I'm convinced that we need to rethink and rebuild many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, but now have come to the end of their life cycle.

There is a case to be made that industrial economy and many of its institutions have finally run out of gas — from newspapers and old models of financial services to our energy grid, transportation systems and institutions for global cooperation and problem solving.  At the same time the contours of a new kind of civilization are becoming clear. Society has at its disposal the most powerful platform ever for bringing together the people, skills and knowledge we need to ensure growth, social development and a just and sustainable world.

In Dubai we are talking about the new realities and new risks. The web provides a new platform to understand and respond to a range of global risks in a more collaborative and proactive and inclusive manner.  We'll be working to build a global risk response mechanism, or "Global Situation Space."

I'm involved in a council looking at how societies can inform themselves in this new networked age and we'll be elaborating key trends, risks/opportunities, probabilities, impact, response and contingency for a new context in which information is not longer composed of atoms but has been unleashed.  Stay tuned.

In Dubai Everything is Connected to Everything Else

At the meeting of the Global Agenda Councils in Dubai it seems that everything is connected to everything else.  One day into it my Council on Informed Societies has had joint discussions with at least half a dozen other Councils and many common themes and challenges are emerging.

The Informed Societies Council grew out of previous councils examining how the digital revolution was destroying the old models of the newspaper, journalism and the media.  The old model was an industrial one based on print and broadcast technology that was centralized, one way, one to many and controllable.  The new media are the antithesis – distributed, one to one and many to many and as such have an awesome neutrality.

So when it comes to informing ourselves as societies consumers of information are also producers with access to the recorded information but also the information contained in the brains of others.  As such, being informed is also about being able to collaborate. But when there is no Walter Cronkite it also places a great responsibility in each of us to filter, be open to more diverse points of view, to protect our privacy, to develop our authentication skills and to design our lives to be informed and knowledgeable.

The same thing is happening in many other Councils.  When it comes to being informed the educational system is critical.  But the old industrial model of education was teacher focused, one way, once fits all and the student was isolated in the learning process.  We're now using the digital revolution to move to a new collaborative approach to pedagogy to be informed.  Schools should also emphasize media literacy to avoid balkanization and enable young people to understand a new media landscape.

Ditto for the Council on Emerging Technologies.  To be informed and educated in the networked world, everyone needs access and the mobile revolution is a key driver.  The Council on Media and Entertainment is struggling with the same issues – how the digital revolution transforms business models and the experience for consumers.  The Council in Institutional Governance is looking at how global institutions can use new collaborative approaches like digital brainstorms and challenges to engage the world's citizens in solving global problems.

The Council on Innovation has discussed moving from Industrial models to networked models. The same thins is true for the Council on Telecommunications.  We need a global high speed platform that is open and free and governments, providers and people everywhere need to defend the web from balkanization.  The Council on Internet Security is also grappling with the same issues.  I've yet to meet someone here who disagrees with Tim Berners-Lee's view that the Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending, and we need to ensure the technological protocols and social conventions we set up respect basic human values.

The shift from industrial models to an age of networked intelligence is everywhere in the Dubai meeting.

NY Times' "Growing Up Digital" story misses the mark

The November 21 Sunday New York Times front-page story "Growing Up Digital" created quite a stir, with among other things more than 430 comments on the New York Times site within 48 hours.

As the author of the actual book Growing Up Digital, its recent sequel Grown Up Digital, the person who originally defined the Net Generation back in 1997 and the director of the biggest research projects to date on this generation, many people have asked me for my thoughts (which curiously were not solicited in the writing of the article).

In the article Matt Richel argues that the experience of growing up in the digital age is producing a generation that is "wired for distraction." Richel follows the life of a bright 17-year-old Vishal Singh who is behind on his studies and not doing well in school because he chooses to do activities on his computer over reading a book and doing his assignments. He is said to be typical of a new generation that is easily distracted, because "developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention."

The article cites anecdotal evidence that teachers are having difficulty getting kids' attention. Unchecked use of digital devices "can create a culture in which students are addicted to the virtual world and lost in it." Multi-tasking is causing bad grades. Many kids, rather than socializing through technology "recede into it" often "escaping" into various media like video games. To make things worse "even as some parents and educators express unease about students' digital diets, they are intensifying efforts to use technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them essential skills."

Parents don't get it either. In fact some of them "wholly embrace computer use, even when it has no obvious educational benefit." Use of video games is keeping kids up at night. Kids aren't getting downtime. They are "becoming habituated to distraction and to switching tasks, not to focus." Some teachers have implemented group reading because "students now lack the attention span to read the assignments on their own."

4,000 words later the article ends with Vishad at 11 pm having wasted his entire Sunday on his computer, settling down to some homework.

It's a pretty bleak picture that would make any teacher and parent want to pull the plug. To be sure, technology can be a distraction. If students are not performing well in school it's the responsibility of parents and teachers to help them organize their lives for success. And of course kids need balance. If your son spends more time in solitary video game playing than hanging with his friends or doing his homework then corrective action is required.

However the Times piece is so clichéd and one-sided that it's more than misleading: it's dangerous. Anecdotes can be deceptive. Making the case that kids are not performing well is like shooting fish in a barrel. Jay Leno does it all the time. However while anecdotes and an occasional expert quote about how kids can't focus makes for a good read, the data speaks otherwise. And there are some very big issues being discussed in this piece, not just about technology and kids, but its role in the home, schools and society. And I worry that many parents and teachers might draw the wrong conclusion.

To begin, there is no actual evidence to support the view that this generation is distracted, performing poorly or otherwise less capable than previous generations. In fact the evidence suggests that on the whole, this is the smartest generation ever. IQ is up year over year for many years, university entrance exam scores are at an all time high and it has never been tougher to get into the best universities. Furthermore, volunteering amongst high school and university students is at an all time high and in the US the percentage of kids that are clean in high school — i.e. they don't do drugs or alcohol — is up year over year for 15 years. This is a generation about which we can be enormously hopeful.

Yes, the bottom tier is not performing well — almost one-third of all students drop out of high school. But even with this group dragging mean scores down there is no noticeable decline in performance. National testing in the U.S. suggests that over the last decade or so, students have improved, especially at the Grade 4 and 8 level, while Grade 12 students have either stayed the same or improved slightly in writing, civics and history.

And when it comes to the poor performance of the bottom tier, blaming the Internet is like blaming the library for illiteracy. There are real problems to be addressed. According to a 2006 report by the Gates Foundation one-third of the dropouts left school to make money, and a significant number left to care for a parent or have a baby. Most in this group come from single parent families where the mom doesn't have time to talk to the kids let alone to work with them on their homework. Kids come to school hungry.

There are also huge cultural factors. The dropout problem is far bigger in inner city public schools than it is in rich white suburbs. While three-quarters of whites graduate, only about half of blacks and Hispanics do. Among rural youth of color, the high school dropout rate is even more alarming than among their urban counterparts. Proportionately, more Net Geners are failing to graduate from high school than any previous generation and test results for many young people are so awful that it has become cliché to say that the educational system in the United States is in crisis.

The sad truth, according to the Gates Foundation report, is that most dropouts could have made it. Nearly half who dropped out said classes were either not interesting or just plain boring. So perhaps the real issue is the gap between how Net Geners think and how most teachers teach. Net Geners are not content to sit mutely and listen to a teacher talk. Kids who have grown up digital expect to be able to respond, to have a conversation. They want a choice in their education, in terms of what they learn, when they learn it, where, and how. They want their education to be relevant to the real world, the one they live in. They want it to be interesting, even fun. Teachers may still think the old-fashioned lecture is important, but the kids don't, futurist Marc Prensky told me recently. He remembers one Australian principal who put it this way: "The teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the Internet is."

Kids' Brains and Technology

As for the brain science, the author should have told the other side of the story. During extended adolescence (age 8-18) a third of the brain gets wired, and how you spend your time is the main factor determining the building of the brain. Consider the typical teenage media diet. Back in the late 1960s, the teenage Baby Boomer in the United States watched an average of over 22 hours of television each week. They were passive viewers; they took what they were given, and when the commercials came, they might even have watched them. Net Geners watch less television than their parents do, and they watch it differently. A Net Gener is more likely to turn on the computer and simultaneously interact in several different windows, talk on the telephone, listen to music, do homework, read a magazine, and watch television. TV has become like background Muzak for them.

Rather than creating dysfunctional brains that can't focus, the evidence is just as strong that experience being "bathed in bits" is pushing the human brain beyond conventional capacity limitations. So-called multitasking may in fact result from better switching abilities and better active working memory. Young people are likely developing brains that are more appropriate for our fast paced, complex world.

And as for kids getting lost in virtual words and losing their social skills? There is no evidence that this is causing a decline in face-to-face communication. Time spent online is not coming at the expense of less time hanging out with friends; it's less time watching television.

To be sure, there is much we don't know about the brain. In fact we've learned more in the last 7 years than in all of history. But some things are becoming clear. The research shows that the brain can change throughout life as it responds to environmental influences. Children's brains can change to a greater degree than adult ones can, but the adult brain can and does change. "Neuroscience has shown that, in the most literal sense, the events of our lives get etched in the very physical structure and the activities of the brain," states Dr. Stan Kutcher, an internationally renowned expert on adolescent mental health, who with his son Matthew, a Net Gen neuroscientist, conducted a study measuring the effect of digital technology on human brain development for the nGenera research program.1

By the time Net Generation kids reach their twenties, the typical Net Gener has spent over 20,000 hours on the Internet and over 10,000 hours playing video games of some kind.2 This immersion is taking place at a time when their brains are particularly sensitive to outside influences — adolescence and their teenage years. Recent studies show that although total brain volume is largely unchanged after age 6, the brain continues to undergo significant structural remodeling throughout the adolescent years and into early adult life. The studies show that brain regions associated with attention, evaluation of rewards, emotional intelligence, impulse control, and goal-directed behavior all change significantly between age 12 and 24. These neurological changes during adolescence may explain, in part, why many teenagers appear to be disorganized, have poor impulse control, and have difficulty making long-term plans.

Research done at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) documented some of the physical changes that take place in the brain between the ages of 4 and 20. It turns out that the volume of nerve cells in the frontal and parietal lobes, which are thought to be responsible for goal-directed behavior and other higher functions, peaks at age 12.3 How can that be? NIMH researchers suggest that after age 12, the brain starts pruning, reducing connections among brain cells. Say, for example, you learned a language from your mother but stopped using it when you started speaking English. The pathways needed to speak your mother's language will die off, while the other neural pathways associated with speaking English will get stronger. In other words, you use it or you lose it. This pruning period lasts until about age 20.

Some studies suggest that the teen brain processes, operates, and functions differently than the brain of an adult. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of University College London conducted a series of studies in which participants were asked to answer hypothetical questions while their brain activity was monitored by MRI imaging. When the question was an impersonal one, the teens, whose average age was 15, used the same parts of their brain to answer as did the 28-year-old adults. But when they were asked a question like "You are at the cinema and have trouble seeing the screen. Do you move to another seat?" the teens used different parts of their brain to answer.4 As this evidence suggests, the teen brain itself — not just our understanding of it — is still a work in progress.

Of course an unchecked obsession with video games, or anything else for that matter is not healthy for a young person. But that's only one side of the story. Video games can be enormously positive. They can teach young people to work in teams. As Generation X came of age, the arcade video games available to them were largely about competition: scores were kept, and there tended to be a winner for every loser. In contrast, popular video games today highlight adventure and exploring what is around the corner, often in real time. They place extraordinary demands on multidimensional visual-spatial skills; enhance abilities for divided attention;5 and encourage players to discover rules through observation, trial and error, and hypothesis testing.6 They often require cooperation with opponents to defeat a common enemy offering problems to be solved collaboratively and creatively, and acting in a global community — signifying the movement of the game-playing experience to being social rather than a solitary activity.

Playing online games can be good for your mind, according to Steven Johnson, writing in Everything Bad Is Good for You: "Games force you to decide, to choose, to prioritize."7. Some of the world's leading thinkers in this field agree. When James Gee, a teacher and theoretical linguist, started playing video games at age 60, he realized he had to think in a new way. To excel at a video game you have to learn skills that are crucial for any learning experience, such as understanding design principles, making choices, practicing, and discovering.8

Matthew Myers, for instance, is a 21-year-old student at Southern Methodist University. He's the captain of his wrestling team, a church youth leader, and president of his dorm. He's also second-in-command in his guild, and every week he spends a few hours playing World o Warcraft. "I'm taking a class on managing people and strategy," he says. "I can take all the lessons that I learn in class and apply them to my guild." He continues to note that managing a group of 40-plus players is a complex job. There are new players to recruit and current guild members who need help raising their skill levels as they pursue quests and run raids.

What about the overall effect of spending so much time in front of a screen — not a TV but an interactive screen? Does the medium affect the way we absorb the information? Back in the 1950s, Marshall McLuhan argued that it does. The way we receive information — by reading a book, watching a movie, or listening to someone on the telephone — has a big impact on the brain, and that impact is even more important than the actual content of the message. In other words, McLuhan said in his famous but somewhat oblique line, "the medium is the message."

The great Toronto thinker did not, of course, have the benefit of modern brain scans. So, Erica Michael and Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University did a brain scan to test McLuhan's hypothesis. It turned out that he was right: the brain constructs the message differently for reading and listening. "Listening to an audio book leaves a different set of memories than reading does," say Michael and Just. "A newscast heard on the radio is processed differently from the same words read in a newspaper."

You'd expect, then, that information absorbed on the Internet would have a different impact than information obtained by reading the newspaper. A 2006 study of Net Geners certainly suggests it does. Researchers played the same newscast in four different ways — as a traditional radio newscast, as an online newscast played with one click, as an interactive Webcast where you click to get each news item, and as a Webcast that included links for details. Net Geners remembered less from the traditional newscasts — told from beginning to end — than they did from the interactive versions that gave them a chance to click to hear the news, or learn more details.9

Multitasking: Are Net Geners Better at Switching Attention?

Media multitasking is a quintessential characteristic of the Net Generation brain. Three out of every four Net Gen students claim to instant message while doing their homework.10 Moreover, in a national study of over 2,000 young people, aged 8 to 18, researchers found that participants were able to squeeze the equivalent of 8.5 hours of electronic media into 6 chronological hours because of multitasking.11 Most parents can't understand it. Boomers usually have trouble focusing on a complicated task if the TV is on, the music is cranked up, and friends are checking in every few minutes. Are Net Geners any better at it than boomers are? Have they learned to be top guns of multitasking?

When I look at my own children, their friends, and legions of other Net Geners, this is what I see: They're faster than I am at switching tasks, and better than I am at blocking out background noise. They can work effectively with music playing and news coming in from Facebook. They can keep up their social networks while they concentrate on work; they seem to need this to feel comfortable. I think they've learned to live in a world where they're bombarded with information, so that they can block out the TV or other distractions while they focus on the task at hand.

Back in 1992, P. David Pearson, a comprehension theorist at the University of Illinois, set forth the skills that a good reader uses to understand a text. The good reader activates prior knowledge, makes sure she understands what she's reading and reads it again if necessary, makes inferences, and synthesizes or summarizes what she's learned. It turns out that searching for information on the Internet requires those same skills — and then some — according to a study in the September 2003 issue of the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.12

Searching for information on the Internet is obviously a different exercise than reading a book. You read or scan until you have found what you wanted, and then you click on a keyword to hunt for more information. Unlike the journey you take when you read a book, no one is holding your hand or serving as your guide. You're on your own. But it requires the same skills you need to read a book — plus the ability to scan, navigate, analyze whether information is pertinent, synthesize, and remember what question you're trying to answer as you click on the links. The RAND Reading Study Group put it this way in 2002: "Accessing the Internet makes large demands on the individuals' literacy skills; in some cases, this new technology requires readers to have novel literacy skills."13

Kids Aren't Paying Attention in School?

So why do some Net Geners seem to have attention deficit disorder in class? Isn't it possible that the answer is because they're bored — both with the slow pace and with the content of the lecture? Researcher Marc Prensky thinks so. "Their attention spans are not short for games, for example, or for music, or rollerblading, or for spending time on the Internet, or anything else that actually interests them," he writes. "It isn't that they can't pay attention, they just choose not to."14

Donald Leu, co-director of the New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut, has found that the skills needed for effective reading of books are different from those you need to read effectively online. To read online, you need all the skills of the off-line reader-plus the ability to search, locate information, and evaluate how pertinent or credible it is. You have to remember what you're looking for — what question you're trying to answer — so you don't get lost in the morass of information. You have to synthesize what you're learning from multiple sources, and usually communicate your findings to someone else. Online, you are creating your own narrative, instead of following the writer's journey. These are different experiences, Leu says. His research shows that conventional text readers are not always good online readers. Sometimes kids who are poor readers of textbooks turn out to be among the top performers in terms of online search and reading skills.

The old model of pedagogy is what I call broadcast learning. It was a one-size-fits-all one-way model designed for the Industrial Age when industry needed workers who did what they were told. The teacher was the sage, and he or she was supposed to deliver knowledge to the grateful students who were expected to write down the sage's words and deliver it back to them, often word for word, in exams if they wanted to score an A.

In the old model, the teacher is the broadcaster, sending information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. It goes like this: I'm a teacher (or professor) and I have knowledge. You're a student and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you. As I often tell educational audiences, the definition of a lecture is the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.

So is it any surprise that teacher-broadcasters and TV broadcasters are both losing their audience? Kids who have grown up digital are abandoning one-way TV for the higher stimulus of interactive communication they find on the Internet. Sitting mutely in front of a TV — or a teacher — doesn't appeal to this generation. But unlike the entertainment world, the educational establishment doesn't offer enough alternatives to the one-way broadcast.

If schools were a business that was routinely losing one-third of its customers — and half in some places — I suspect the board of directors would insist on some fundamental changes, or simply fire the CEO. So why doesn't the school system do what some of the leading customer-faced companies are doing today? Focus on the customer, or in this case, the student. It sounds simple, but as many companies have found, focusing on the customer requires a deep change throughout the organization. This means changing the relationship between student and teacher in the learning process.

Films like Waiting for "Superman" don't help much. They blame teachers and suggest that charter schools are the answer, when what's needed is an entirely new model of pedagogy and educational modus operandi. To focus on the student, teachers have to step off the stage and start listening and conversing instead of just lecturing. In other words, they have to abandon their broadcast style and adopt an interactive one. Second, they should encourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the teacher's information. Third, they need to encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the school. Finally, they need to tailor the style of education to their students' individual learning styles.

Some leading educators are calling for this kind of massive change, such as Richard Sweeney, university librarian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He says the education model has to change to suit this generation of students. Smart but impatient, they like to collaborate and they reject one-way lectures. While some educators view this as pandering to a generation, Sweeney is firm: "They want to learn, but they want to learn only from what they have to learn, and they want to learn it in a style that is best for them."

The Kids Are All Right

Over my career, I have listened to thousands of people make dire predictions about what technology will do to young brains. TV was supposed to melt their minds. Video games would turn them into zombies. It hasn't happened. So I'm skeptical when I read that digital immersion is making kids stupid. And I've yet to see any convincing evidence.

The Times article was just the latest in litany of pieces. Take Mark Bauerlein, the English professor who wrote The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. The premise of his book is that youth today are stupider than any preceding generation because they spend so much time immersed in digital technology, especially the Internet. But even Bauerlein has to admit that raw IQ scores have been going up three points a decade since World War II, and that screentime's ability to improve certain visual processing skills may have played a role in the rise in recent years.15 After noting that inconvenient fact, the professor acknowledges that Net Geners may be "mentally agile" but says they are "culturally ignorant." They don't read the great works of literature, he complains, and their general knowledge is poor — they suffer from what he calls "vigorous indiscriminate ignorance." So now he's arguing that they're not mentally slow, just ignorant. But are Net Geners any more ignorant than boomers were at their age? Again no evidence is provided.

The professor hunts for more evidence to support the grandstanding title of his book from school test scores. "No cohort in human history has opened such a fissure between its material conditions and its intellectual attainments," he thunders. "None has experienced so many technological enhancements and yielded so little mental progress." In other words, they should be doing better, presumably because of the Internet. So which is it? The Internet is a force for stupefication or enlightenment?

The Times piece ends with the story of Vishal, who after a long Sunday on his computer is finally getting to his homework at 11pm. But we learn that Vishal's time online was in fact editing his new film. Vishal is a budding film director! Sure, he should get to his homework earlier. But the reader is left wondering how Vishal's passion for his craft, and his laser-like focus on editing over a 12-hour period is somehow evidence that he has lost his intellect or his attention span.

Sure there are unknowns and challenges as this media revolution extends out into every aspect of human existence. And all of us need to better design our families and our own lives to ensure that this smaller world will be a better one for all of us.

But the evidence suggests that many young people today are using technology to become smarter and more capable than their parents ever could be; and, like Vishal, to accomplish important, perhaps great things. Rather than kids losing their attention spans there is a stronger case to be made that growing up digital is equipping today's youth with the mental skills, such as scanning and quick mental switching, that they'll need to deal with today's overflow of information. The superior performance for many of them, as evidence by university graduation rates show they know when they have to focus, just as the most intelligent members of my generation did. They may think and process information in a different way than most boomers do, but that doesn't stop them from coming up with brilliant insights, new models of doing business, new ways of collaborating; or, for that matter, creating a carefully edited film as a teenager.

Don Tapscott is the author of Growing Up Digital (1997) and Grown Up digital (2008) and most recently with Anthony D. Williams Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World (2010).

1. Kutcher and Kutcher, "Understanding Differences of a Cognitive and Neurological Kind," 4

2. Marc Prensky, Digital Game-Based Learning, 1st ed., New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

3. Jay N. Giedd et al., "Brain Development during Childhood and Adolescence: A Longitudinal MRI Study," Nature Neuroscience, vol. 2, 1999, 861-63, www.nature.com.

4. Miranda Hitti and Louise Chang, M.D., "Teen Brain: It's All About Me," WebMD Medical News, www.ivorweiner.com, May 5, 2008.

5. Patricia Marks Greenfield et al., "Action Video Games and Informal Education: Effects on Strategies for Dividing Visual Attention," Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, vol. 15, 1994, 105-23, h.

6. Ibid., Prensky, Digital Game Based Learning

7. Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You, New York: Riverhead, 2005

8. James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, 1st ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

9. Hesham M. Mesbah, "The Impact of Linear vs. Non-linear Listening to Radio News on Recall and Comprehension," Journal of Radio and Audio Media, vol. 13, no. 2, December 2006, 187-200, www.leaonline.com.

10. Hesham M. Mesbah, "The Impact of Linear vs. Non-linear Listening to Radio News on Recall and Comprehension," Journal of Radio and Audio Media, vol. 13, no. 2, December 2006, 187-200, www.leaonline.com.

11. Donald F. Roberts et al., "Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-Olds," Kaiser Family Foundation Study, March 2005, www.kff.org.

12. Elizabeth Schmar-Dobler, "Reading on the Internet: The Link between Literacy and Technology," Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, September 2003, www.readingonline.org.

13. Catherine E. Snow and RAND Reading Study Group, Reading for Understanding: Toward an R&D Program in Reading Comprehension, RAND Corporation, 2002.

14. Ibid., Prensky, Digital Game Based Learning

15. Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You, New York: Riverhead, 2005. "Think of the cognitive labor–and play–that your average 10-year-old would have experienced outside school 100 years ago: reading books when they were available, playing with simple toys, improvising neighborhood games like stickball an kick the can, and most of all doing household chores–or even working as a child laborer. Compare that with the cultural and technological mastery of a 10-year-old today: following dozens of professional sports teams; shifting effortlessly from phone to IM to e-mail in communicating with friends; probing and telescoping through immense virtual worlds; adopting and troubleshooting new media technologies without flinching."

Tea with The Economist

Don Tapscott has tea with the Economist and discusses how social media lowers collaboration costs and why companies and governments should embrace these new tools.

Put patients in charge of their health

The New York Times reported earlier this week that Britain's largest software maker, Autonomy, is releasing a new software package to help doctors make diagnoses.  The software is called Autonomy Auminence.  It culls data from patient records, physician notes, lab reports and medical literature. It then gives the physician a "dashboard" with a checklist of diagnoses to consider, ranked by probability, according to the inferences made by Autonomy's software. The checklist can be delivered to personal computer, iPad or other device.

"Our technology lets you go beyond structured data to capture more of the background, contextual information to make better decisions," Michael Lynch, Autonomy's chief executive, told the Times.

With a few modifications, Macrowikinomics readers will recognize the Autonomy software's resemblance to the innovation we called for in health care. In our vision of a collaborative health care world, everyone should have their own online Personal Health Page.  Much of the content would be similar to the Autonomy "dashboard" concept.  However, instead of the information being the property of the doctor, it would be owned by the patient.

Your Personal Health Page would be your own record of the health-related information filed by the different places from which you've received healthcare services, such as clinics, hospitals and diagnostic labs.  This information would remain secure and confidential. You would determine how and when other people, such as medical personnel, pharmacists, and insurers could access the information. For example, you might allow researchers to access your information only after it has been stripped of any personally identifying data.

More than just a private medical record, your Personal Health Page would help you reach out to other organizations such as Weight Watchers or a local health club that could contribute to your well-being. Imagine that you log onto your PHP and the first thing is a news feed giving you updates from others in your community that share a common illness, or from your medical professionals with the latest information about a new medical discovery. You are able to create communities or join medical "causes" much like with a generic social network.

Scheduling tools would help you plan a visit to your family doctor and your doctor could request information from you about how a certain treatment is working. The possibilities are almost limitless. Giving patients access to personal health records gives them the opportunity to identify and update missing or incorrect information. With its ability to aggregate patient medical information across providers, the Personal Health Page could also help provide the holistic view of a patient's medical history that would help reduce healthcare errors.

Needed: A New Model of Pedagogy

The film Waiting for Superman has sparked heated discussion about the failures of the U.S. public school system, and more broadly with public education everywhere.  The movie argues that teachers are at the center of the problem and that the solution is charter schools.

But it's wrong to blame teachers, who are usually a) underpaid, and b) striving to do the best with the limited resources they are given. Nor does the research show that charter schools achieve better outcomes.  The root of the malaise in our schools is the outmoded model of pedagogy.  Teachers and text books are assumed to be the source of knowledge.  Teachers "teach" – they impart knowledge to their students, who through practice and assignments learn how to perform well on tests.

This is the very best model of pedagogy that 18th century technology can provide.  It's teacher-centered model that is one way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. It's time for a rethinking of the entire model of learning.  We need to move to a customized and collaborative model that embraces 21st century learning technology and techniques.  This is not about technology per se – it's about a change in the relationship between the student and teacher in the learning process.

By now, virtually every schoolchild in the U.S. and Canada knows how to use the Internet to have fun, talk to friends, play games and explore. But when they get into the typical classroom, most of them step back in time, to a world that would be familiar to teachers 200 years ago when blackboard and chalk were introduced as a brilliant new way to visualize information.

But what would happen if the classroom were brought into the 21st century? One doesn't have to guess: there are some extraordinary initiatives that come from some surprising places, outside the US.  The province of New Brunswick in Canada did it five years ago when it handed out laptops to Grade 7 and 8 students and teachers in six schools, French and English.

The results from the first two years of the pilot project "have been dramatic and overwhelmingly positive for all involved with the project," according to two prominent academics who reviewed the two-year project. The report card, by Michael Fox, vice-president of Mount Allison University, and Jim Greenlaw, dean of education at University of Ontario Institute of Technology, was glowing: Students wrote more, and produced higher quality work. They demonstrated effective research, analytical and evaluative skills in the digital environment. They were more interested in learning. School was more fun. Their grades went up. The results were so positive that New Brunswick expanded the one-laptop-per-child program to cover 3900 school children, or 23 per cent of Grade 7 and 8 students, over five years, ending in June.

Yet still today, most public school classrooms in Canada remain stuck in the trapping of the 18th century, not in the 21st century in which we live. Many policy makers blame the perceived cost, which could be as much as $1,000 per year if you include teacher training, maintenance, and all the other costs of ownership. (The New Brunswick program cost $37.2 million over five years.) Yet the real issue, as Fox and Greenlaw suggest, is our vision: Are we, the adults, willing to accept that children who are growing up digital learn far more in an interactive, collaborative environment?  Are we willing to accept that an Industrial Age form of education isn't much good for children who have to work in a digital age?

To break from the past takes courage and vision. If policy makers are hunting for a model, they might take a look at Portugal, a modest country across the Atlantic that's turning into the world leader in rethinking education for the 21st century. In early 2005 Portugal's economy was sagging, and it was running out of the usual economic fixes. It also scored some of the lowest educational achievement results in Western Europe.

So Prime Minister Jose Socrates took a courageous step. He decided to invest heavily in a "technological shock" to jolt his country into the 21st century. This meant, among other things, that he'd make sure everyone in the workforce could handle a computer and use the Internet effectively. This would transform Portuguese society by giving people immediate access to the online world. It would open up huge opportunities that could make Portugal a richer and more competitive country.

In 2005, only 31% of the Portuguese households had access to the Internet. To improve this penetration, the logical place to start was in school, where there was only one computer for five kids. The aim was to have one computer for every two students by 2010.

So Portugal launched the biggest program in the world to equip every child in the country with a laptop and access to the web and the world of collaborative learning. To pay for it, Portugal tapped into both government funds and money from mobile operators who were granted 3G licenses. That subsidized the sale of one million ultra-cheap laptops to teachers, school children, and adult learners.

Here's how it works: If you're a teacher or a student, you can buy a laptop for 150 Euros (U.S. $207). You also get a discounted rate for broadband Internet access, wired or wireless. Low income students get an even bigger discount, and connected laptops are free or virtually free for the poorest kids. For the youngest students in Grades 1 to 4, the laptop/Internet access deal is even cheaper — 50 Euros for those who can pay; free for those who can't.

That's only the start: Portugal has invested 400 million Euros to makes sure each classroom has access to the Internet. Just about every classroom in the public system now has an interactive smart board, instead of the old fashioned blackboard.

This means that nearly nine out of 10 students in Grades 1 to 4 have a laptop on their desk. The impact on the classroom is tremendous, as I saw this spring when I toured a classroom of seven-year-olds in a public school in Lisbon. It was the most exciting, noisy, collaborative classroom I have seen in the world.

The teacher directed the kids to an astronomy blog with a beautiful color image of a rotating solar system on the screen. "Now," said the teacher, "Who knows what the equinox is?"

Nobody knew.

"Alright, why don't you find out?"

The chattering began, as the children clustered together to figure out what an equinox was. Then one group leapt up and waved their hands. They found it! They then proceeded to explain the idea to their classmates.

This, I thought, was the exact opposite of everything that is wrong with the classroom system in North America.

The children in this Portuguese classroom loved learning about astronomy. They were collaborating. They were working at their own pace. They barely noticed the technology;  it was like air to them. But it changed the relationship they had with their teacher. Instead of fidgeting in their chairs while the teacher lectures and scrawls some notes on the blackboard, they were the explorers, the discoverers, and the teacher was their helpful guide.

Yet too often, in the American and Canadian school system, teachers still rely on the traditional model of education. Teachers often feel that this is the only way to teach a large classroom of kids, and yet the classroom in Portugal shows that giving kids laptops can free the teacher to introduce a new way of learning that's more natural for kids who have grown up digital at home.

First, it allows teachers to step off the stage and start listening and conversing instead of just lecturing. Second, the teacher can encourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the teacher's information. Third, the teacher can encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the school. Finally, the teacher can tailor the style of education to their students' individual learning styles.

Portugal has been careful to invest in teacher training to capitalize on the possibilities of the laptops.  It's also thinking of creating a new online platform to allow teachers to work together to create new lessons and course materials that take advantage of the interactive technology. Through this collaboration, the Portuguese school system will create exciting new online materials to educate children. Lots of ideas are already making their way into Portuguese classrooms, says Mario Franco, chair of the Foundation for Mobile Communication, which is managing the e-school program. There are 50 different educational programs and games inside the laptops the youngest children use. The laptops are even equipped with a control to encourage kids to finish their homework and score high marks. If they do, they get more time to play.

It's too early to assess the impact on learning in Portuguese schools. Studies of the impact of computers in schools elsewhere have been inconclusive, or mixed. One key problem is that simply providing computers in schools is not enough. Teachers facing a classroom of kids with laptops need to learn that they are no longer the expert in their domain; the Internet is.

It's heartening to know that a tiny province like New Brunswick is giving teachers plenty of opportunity to change their mode of teaching. Teachers can tap into government funds to create new and innovative programs. They can work with teachers around the globe to come up with new ways of teaching that make the most of the technological tools. Teens in New Brunswick are encouraged to meet teens around the globe in online forums and collaborate with them on projects. Technology, in other words, is only the tool. The real work is creating a new model of learning – one that fits the 21st century.