Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future

by David Price

The Open Revolution Going ‘open’ is a social revolution that represents a fundamental challenge to the

established order of things – one that cannot be ignored. It disrupts and changes, so things can never be the same again. But, as with all revolutions, there are winners and losers. The winners are ourselves, happily connecting and collaborating through global networks of friends, colleagues and online acquaintances. We are powerfully motivated by the easy access to ideas and information, and the informality, immediacy and autonomy that it brings. The losers are our formal institutions: businesses, schools, colleges and public services that are failing to grasp the enormity of the change taking place. Most dramatically, the losers are also governments around the world that are now confronted by citizens who will no longer tolerate secrecy and deception.

Because information flows faster and more freely than ever, and because we are better connected than ever, the barriers to learning are being dismantled. We share what we learn instantly and, generally, without restrictions. How we learn, and whom we learn from, has been transformed. Our reliance upon anointed experts and authority figures has diminished, while our capacity to learn from each other has spiralled.

the ideas behind these new social and political movements were able to propagate through the rise of disruptive, facilitative technologies.

While China may be the world’s biggest manufacturing plant, India is set to lead the way in the industry that poses the biggest threat to western middle-class parents seeking to put their sons or daughters through college: knowledge.

Acquiring and applying knowledge in order to remain economically competitive is, of course, the whole point of the learning revolution.

Now the scientific, medical, technological, and engineering jobs are starting to go too

Gee and Shaffer highlight the difference between ‘commodity jobs’ – standardised, replicable and sold at a reasonable price – and ‘innovation jobs’, which require specialised, unique skills. Because it’s a relatively simple task to train workers doing commodity jobs, they can be sourced anywhere in the world. Gee and Shaffer argue that the US education system is still preparing students for commodity jobs, and thus facing overwhelming competition from developing countries, when it should be educating and training for ‘innovation jobs’, which are less easily outsourced.

‘jobs’ is something of a misnomer: in the future, we are more likely to be talking about ‘tasks’ or contracts.

Our kids are less likely to be applying for jobs and more likely to be bidding for contracts.

‘Knowledge Process Outsourcing’ (KPO).

We’re building flexible, virtual project delivery teams, made up of graduates working in several countries, linked only by a broadband connection and a desire to keep their reputation rating high and our costs low.

The difficult but unavoidable truth is that we are in the midst of a global economic rebalancing, which will take decades to sort itself out.

we should learn to embrace uncertainty, because this age of uncertainty could become permanent.

The second is that if all the old certainties are gone, then we have to be open to radical shifts in how we work, live and learn.

The opening of learning is transforming every aspect of our lives. It offers the promise of a more equal distribution of wealth, opportunity and power.

Machine Learning (‘the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed’)

over 100,000 people registered. Coursera

peer assessment.

peer grading at Coursera

almost always correlates to tutor grading.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) such as Machine Learning have the potential to ‘establish education as a fundamental human right, where anyone around the world with the ability and the motivation could get the skills that they need to make a better life for themselves’.

‘Open’ is a disruptive force because in the places where we spend most of our waking hours – the office, school or college – it’s been pretty much business as usual. It’s often said that a time-traveller from the 19th century, beamed into today’s world, would be bewildered by everything he witnessed, but would instantly feel comfortable in a school.

succeeds, open online learning is likely to be introduced in all Californian universities, and when it comes to education, what California does today, the rest of America does tomorrow.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said that “Teachers who can be replaced by a machine, should be”.

As the evidence accumulates that online learning at worst does no harm and at best out-performs face-to-face, more learning institutions and teachers will have to ‘blend’ their teaching. We will see more alternatives to lectures in large halls, via anytime, anywhere online viewings. But it isn’t simply the when and where of learning that’s being transformed – it’s the how, too.

The historian Plutarch’s quote that ‘The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled’,

advocate ‘didactic’ instruction put the teacher at the centre: the best way to learn is for the expert to transmit and the student to receive, pouring knowledge into an empty vessel. Retaining this knowledge has always been a bit of a challenge, so rote learning – memorising and reciting facts, multiplication tables, and so on – usually accompanied didactic/transmissive teaching.

As Sir Ken Robinson has brilliantly observed7 this method of instruction8 was easy to measure – didactic teaching begat rote learning, which in turn begat paper-based examination. It became the dominant method of learning in universities, neatly side-stepping the tiresome reality that in real life we’re usually tested by our competence in performing tasks. Since we te...

The main vehicle for this form of learning is ‘the lecture’ and the main tool for rote le...

‘scaffold’ experiences so that the learner can make connections, build confidence, reinforce skills, and apply knowledge to solve problems.

companies in the world – Amazon (Jeff Bezos) and Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) all attended Montessori schools. Larry Page credits going to Montessori, not Stanford University, as the reason for his success:

‘Open’ is shifting the focus of attention from how we should teach, to the best ways to learn.

Instead, it’s about what we can do for ourselves, how we can tap into the knowledge and expertise that is within all of us, but rarely mined. In short, it’s about the rise of informal learning.

horizontally networked (participant as expert and learner).

The Open University is, thankfully, now making its resources available to anyone, and, in 2013, even launched a collaborative learning initiative: Social Learn.

Encouraging learners to share what they know, and constructing knowledge together, subtly shifts our expectation of teachers and other leaders of learning: from giving authoritative answers to asking challenging questions; from the sage on the stage, to the guide on the side.

‘tacit learning’: we learn, not simply by logical reasoning, but by observing, absorbing, tinkering, following hunches.

Confucius who said “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand”.

‘action learning’, working with others on problems, acting and then reflecting on those actions.

‘collaboration is an unnatural act between non-consenting adults’

Share, Open, Free and Trust. They form an easy-to-remember acronym SOFT.

the actions of sharing, opening, freeing and trusting are starting to disrupt business models, marketing strategies and organisational charts around the world.

businesses, schools and colleges that continue with ‘command and control’ as their dominant forms of leadership and intellectual property strategies are facing extinction, possibly within five to ten years. Why? Because we, as consumers, employees and, crucially, learners, won’t

stand for it anymore.

the people who benefit most from the collective wisdom found on forums feel the greatest need to reciprocate.

online collaboration would, in the future, lead to

collaborative action.

the Arab Spring

forms a central tenet of this book: that people will collectively act to determine their own destinies simply because they now can. The institutions, which are there to govern, protect, or indeed, educate us, cannot compete against the cognitive surplus of a passionate group of individuals acting in concert.