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Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.
Teaching kids how to nourish their creativity and curiosity, while still providing a sound foundation in critical thinking, literacy and math, is the best way to prepare them for a future of increasingly rapid technological change.
Using the laptop as the agency for engaging children in constructing knowledge based upon their personal interests and providing them tools for sharing and critiquing these constructions will lead them to become learners and teachers.”
confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions—but it can often limit our ability to take in new data and change old opinions.
“From the very beginning of time until the year 2003,” says Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, “humankind created five exabytes of digital information. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes—or a 1 with eighteen zeroes after it. Right now, in the year 2010, the human race is generating five exabytes of information every two days. By the year 2013, the number will be five exabytes produced every ten minutes … It’s no wonder we’re exhausted.”
we fall prey to what’s become known as the “hype cycle.” We have inflated expectations when a novel technology is first introduced, followed by short-term disappointment when it doesn’t live up to the hype. But this is the important part: we also consistently fail to recognize the post-hype, massively transformative nature of exponential technologies—meaning that we literally have a blind spot for the technological possibilities underlying our vision of abundance.
The reason we care so much about what happens to the likes of Lady Gaga is not because her shenanigans will ever impact our lives; rather because our brain doesn’t realize there’s a difference between rock stars we know about and relatives we know.
In Steven Levy’s In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, Google cofounder Larry Page describes the future of search in similar terms: “It [Google] will be included in people’s brains. When you think about something you don’t know much about, you will automatically get the information.”
The modern graduate degree has become the realm of the ultraspecialized. A typical doctoral thesis focuses on a topic so insanely obscure that few can decipher its title, forget about content. While such extreme narrowness is important to specialization—which, as Ridley pointed out, has a huge upside—it has also created a world where the best universities rarely produce integrative, macroscopic thinkers.
If IBM’s estimations are correct, over the next eight years, its new chip design will accelerate supercomputer performance a thousandfold, taking us from our current 2.6 petaflops to an exaflop (that’s 10 to the 18th, or a quintillion operations per second)—or one hundred times faster than the human brain.
A quick tour of YouTube shows the PR2 opening doors, folding laundry, fetching a beer, playing pool, and cleaning house.
On average, Hollywood produces five hundred films per year and reaches a worldwide audience of 2.6 billion. If the average length of those films is two hours, then Hollywood produces one thousand hours of content per year. YouTube users, on the other hand, upload forty-eight hours’ worth of videos every minute. This means, every twenty-one minutes, YouTube provides more novel entertainment than Hollywood does in twelve months. And the YouTube audience? In 2009 it received 129 million views a day, so in twenty-one days, the site reached more people than Hollywood does in a year.
Interesting fact I'll be sharing with my students today...
The reason that 70 percent of the world’s water is used for agriculture is because one egg requires 120 gallons to produce. There are 100 gallons in a watermelon. Meat is among our thirstiest commodities, requiring 2,500 gallons per pound or, as Newsweek once explained, “the water that goes into a 1,000-pound steer would float a destroyer.”
“Right now,” says Joy, “we’re fixated on having too much of everything: thousands of friends, vacation homes, cars, all this crazy stuff. But we’re also seeing the tip of the dematerialization wave, like when a phone dematerializes a camera. It just disappears.” Just think of all the consumer goods and services that are now available with the average smart phone: cameras, radios, televisions, web browsers, recording studios, editing suites, movie theaters, GPS navigators, word processors, spreadsheets, stereos, flashlights, board games, card games, video games, a whole range of medical
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schools were asked to restrict the number of Internet portals to one per every four students because, as Matt Ridley wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “one child in front of a computer learns little; four discussing and debating learn a lot.”
Mitra has since taken a job as a professor of education technology at the University of Newcastle in England, where he’s developing a new model of primary school education he calls “minimally invasive education.” To this end, he’s created “self-organized learning environments” (SOLES) in countries around the world. These SOLES are really just computer workstations with benches in front of them. The benches seat four. Because SOLES are also installed in places where good teachers cannot be found, these machines are hooked up to what Mitra calls the “granny cloud”—literally groups of
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Papert delivered a now-famous paper, “Teaching Children Thinking,” in which he argued that the best way for children to learn was not through “instruction,” but rather through “construction”—that is, learning through doing, especially when that doing involved a computer.
If boredom is the number one cause of truancy, then our new education system needs to be effective, scalable, and wildly entertaining. In fact, wildly entertaining might not be enough. If we really want to prepare our children for the future, then learning needs to become addictive.
Instead Sheldon has implemented an “experience points” game-based design. Students begin the semester as a level zero avatar (equivalent to an F), and strive toward a level 12 (an A). This means that anything you do in the class produces forward motion, and students always know exactly where they stand—two conditions that serve to motivate.
Taking things even further are new schools like Quest2Learn. Founded by Katie Salen, a former associate professor of design and technology at Parsons the New School for Design, Q2L is a New York public school with a curriculum based on game design and digital culture.
“A video game is just an assessment,” continues Gee. “All you do is get assessed, every moment, as you try to solve problems. And if you don’t solve a problem, the game says you failed, try again. And you do. Why? Because games take testing, the most ludicrous, painful part of school, and make it fun.
During the early sixteen hundreds in England, two-thirds of all children died before the age of four,
A recent RAND Corporation report illustrates these points precisely, finding that preventable medical errors in hospitals result in tens of thousands of deaths per year; preventable medication errors occur at least one and a half million times annually; and, on average, adults receive only 55 percent of recommended care, meaning that 45 percent of the time, our doctors get it wrong.
Two-thirds of Iran is under the age of thirty. Cohen dubbed them “the real opposition,” a massive, not-especially-dogmatic youth movement hungry for Western culture and suffocating under the current regime.
In a world without constraints, most people take their time on projects, assume fewer risks, spend money wastefully, and try to reach their goals in comfortable and traditional ways—which, of course, leads nowhere new.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke, inventor of the geostationary communication satellite and author of dozens of best-selling science-fiction books, knew something about the evolution of great ideas. He described three stages to their development. “In the beginning,” says Clarke, “people tell you that’s a crazy idea, and it’ll never work. Next, people say your idea might work, but it’s not worth doing. Finally, eventually, people say, I told you that it was a great idea all along!”
There will always be naysayers. People will resist breakthrough ideas until the moment they’re accepted as the new norm.
