Open Quotes

“When President Obama asked to meet with Steve Jobs, the late Apple boss, his first question was ‘how much would it cost to make the iPhone in the United States, instead of overseas?’ Jobs was characteristically blunt, asserting that ‘those jobs are never coming back’. In point of fact, it’s been estimated that making iPhones exclusively in the US would add around $65 to the cost of each phone – not an unaffordable cost, or an unthinkable drop in margin for Apple, if it meant bringing jobs back home.  But American workers aren’t going to be making iPhones anytime soon, because of the need for speed, and scale, in getting the product on to shelves around the world. When Apple assessed the global demand for the iPhone it estimated that it would need almost 9,000 engineers overseeing the production process to meet demand. Their analysts reported that it would take nine months to recruit that many engineers in the US – in China, it took 15 days. It’s these kind of tales that cause US conservative media outlets to graphically describe Asia as ‘eating the lunch’ off the tables of patriotic, if sleep-walking, American citizens. If Apple had chosen to go to India, instead of China, the costs may have been slightly higher, but the supply of suitably qualified engineers would have been just as plentiful. 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.”
― David Price, Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future

“The erosion of trust in public school systems has had catastrophic consequences, and will take decades to put right. As we’ve seen, attempts to make schools ‘more accountable’ for their test scores leave teachers torn between what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls ‘doing the right thing and doing the required thing’. The right thing is to teach students through personalised, flexible methods, according to their needs, interests and aspirations; the required thing is to ‘turnaround’ test scores, by ‘teaching to the test’ or, worse, ‘gaming’ the system.  Successive US federal administrations have sought to improve school standards through high accountability. The pressure this puts upon schools at risk of closure and teachers – with test scores linked to pay rates – is intense. During 2011/12 a series of allegations emerged of inner-city schools in New York, Washington DC, Atlanta and Philadelphia ‘cheating’ on student test scores in order to hit accountability targets. Undoubtedly a case of fear producing wrong figures. The result of doing the required thing, above the right thing, is what Schwartz describes as a ‘de-moral-ised’ profession. The double tragedy is that, in addition to the pressure put on teachers – 50 percent of new teachers in the US leave the profession within their first five years – there’s growing evidence that the over-reliance on standardised testing fails to improve academic learning anyway.”
― David Price, Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future

“If collaboration is a headache for learning in the workplace, it’s hard to know where to start with schools. First, most schools don’t call it ‘sharing’ anyway – they call it ‘cheating’. Think about it for a moment: the kids who are now in school will be entering a workplace where internal and external collaboration is the work. We prepare them for this interconnected world, by insisting that almost everything they do, every piece of work they submit, is their own work, not the fruits of working with others, because every student has to have an individual, rigorously assessed, accountable grade – if they don’t, the entire examinations system collapses like a deck of cards.  Except it doesn’t.”
― David Price, Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future

“Digital technologies will no more solve the so-called ‘crisis in education’ than airbags will stop drivers from having accidents.  What digital technologies can do, however, is to dramatically accelerate the changes in behaviours, values, and actions, which then transform the way we learn and our capacity to learn.”
― David Price, Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future

“The really important aspect of tacit learning, as any apprentice will tell you, is that it’s almost a process of osmosis. You gain more insight from simply being around someone, and sharing experiences with them, than you would do by explicit instruction.”
― David Price, Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future

“Open learning is frequently, and in my view, incorrectly trivialised as people ‘just chatting’ on social media. My belief is that this perception misses the point: ‘open’ is not simply about technology, it’s about behaviour shift as well.”
― David Price, Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future

“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.”
― David Price, Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future

“The public debate, however, ignores this complexity for a more reassuring simplicity, encapsulated in Ken Robinson’s lament: ‘we keep trying to build a better steam engine’. Whenever education is discussed in the media, politicians and parents alike inevitably retreat into a ‘when I was at school’ certainty, based upon little more than a nostalgic belief that, if it worked for them, it should work for everyone. They are apparently oblivious to the challenge to formal education that the rise of the informal presents. Why, for example, should the end-users of formal education – students – be satisfied with attending a physical centre five days a week, using technology that, in many schools, is slower and more restrictive than the tablet or mobile phone that they carry with them (but are usually prevented from using) when in school? Why should we continue to group young people by the year they were born, to study subjects copied from 19th-century universities, when their passion outside school is to develop skills, learning alongside people of all ages, effectively organising their own ‘curriculum’?”
― David Price, Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future

“We face a complex set of possible futures and no one can authoritatively predict how things will look in ten years, let alone by the end of the century. We know only two things for certain. The first is that 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. That’s why going ‘open’ is unavoidable.”
― David Price, Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future

“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.”
― David Price, Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future