In an Internet minute

The futurologist Ray Kurzweil once said that 'change is not linear, it is exponential.' Sociologist Alvin Toffler described three waves of evolution in our interaction with tools. The first two, the agricultural and industrial revolutions laid the foundations for the larger, Third Wave - the technology revolution. Prior to the technological wave,  life changed relatively slowly, and change was linear, but in the advent of new technologies, we are lurching from change to change without pause. The technological Wave has changed everything in life, including the way we work and trade, learn, provide healthcare, entertain ourselves, conduct our relationships and interact. Arguably, old rubrics which described, but did not govern the pace of technological change (see for example Metcalfe's Law or Moore's Law) may already be outmoded.

The infographic on this page illustrates the sheer volume of  user generated content and user activity that occurs every 60 seconds somewhere on the Internet. In one minute there are over 2 million search queries on Google, 6 million Facebook views, over 200 million e-mails sent and 100,000 tweets. These staggering metrics are only the tip of the iceberg. We can expect to see exponential rises in all of these and the emergence of new and more dynamic social media and communication systems. One of the most marked changes are the upsurge in the use of mobile technology, with 1,300 new mobile users every minute. Mobile phones, tablets and laptops are portable gateways into the Internet, and it is predicted by 2015 that there will be twice as many mobile devices on the planet as there are humans. This means that access to the Web will increase, and there will be a steep rise in Internet activity, probably beyond what we can ever imagine. This assumes that the growth rate will continue at its current pace, which of course it won't. It also assumes that people will (and are) using more than one device to access the Internet. I currently have 3 devices with me, and I'm using two of them to write this blog post.

Whichever way we look at this, we know beyond reasonable doubt that demands on the Internet will continue to rise. Are we prepared for this exponential rise in use? The biggest challenge facing us now is not how to use the Internet, but being able to futureproof it so that we have enough bandwidth, capacity and storage space to hold all of the user generated content that is coming. Another challenge is to ensure that the Internet improves in terms of speed, security and usability.

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In an Internet minute by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Manufactured education

In 1980, sociologist Alvin Toffler described a third wave of civilisation, the first two 'waves' of the agricultural, and the industrial civilisations would be swept aside by a greater, technological wave. Describing the disruptive and transformational impact of this technological wave, Toffler wrote:


"The emergent civilisation writes a new code of behaviour for us and carries us beyond standardisation, synchronisation and centralisation, beyond the concentration of energy, money and power. The new civilisation, as it challenges the old, will topple bureaucracies, reduce the role of the nation state, and give rise to semi-autonomous economies in a post imperialist world" (Toffler, 1980, p 24). 


This prescient view of the future of society has largely been realised. Toffler envisioned a world in which centralised power was dissipated, and where control was firmly in the hands of each individual. It is clear that technological developments have radically transformed the structure of society over the last few decades. As it accelerates further, and pervades more deeply into our world, technology will continue to disrupt our way of life. The advent of the World Wide Web has changed forever the way we communicate, share ideas, buy and sell, are entertained, and conduct our relationships. But technology has reached farther into our society still. The use of mobile telephones and social media has also promulgated democratic change and political upheaval in recent years. Social media played a vital role in Barack Obama's election success, and was instrumental in overthrowing governments in a number of countries during the Arab Spring. Technology can liberate ideas, amplify content and reach far into previously information poor regions of the world. The issues of standardisation, synchronisation and centralisation Toffler identified - the bastions of previous industrial age processes - are indeed being challenged as individuals within society carve their own niches in business, entertainment, government, the media and personalised learning. Very early on in the short history of the Internet, sites such as Napster began to erode the power structures enjoyed by the elite music industry giants. Similar events occurred in the film and photography industries. Nic Negroponte's prediction that atoms would be transformed into bits was realised when music and book sales flipped from CDs and paper based to downloads and e-books. Even the long lived postal delivery service has seen declining popularity as a result of the increased accessibility of e-mail and social networking services. 


And yet standardisation, synchonisation and centralisation stubbornly persist in a few notable enclaves. Perhaps the most notorious resistance to the technological wave comes from the state education systems. Synchronisation of behaviour was required in the industrial age. Industrial processes such as ship building, mining and manufacturing required workers to arrive at the gates together, work beside each other in teams and operate in specialised compartments to get the job done. It was little wonder that the schools tasked to train these workforces emulated these practices by requiring children to turn up to the gates at the same time, work together in rows, supervised by a teacher (representing the foreman), and be delivered curriculum subjects that were compartmentalised with little or no explicit linkage. Sound familiar? Well, this scenario will be as familiar to those who went to school in the 1950s and those who attend school today. Little has changed, even though, ironically, the world of production and manufacturing has gone through radical change and is now but a vestige of its former self. Technology may be in the schools, but little has changed in terms of the pedagogy practiced in many. The factory model of education persists, because in the mind of its proponents, it is still the most efficient, cost effective way to train the workforce of the future. And yet, according to critics such as Sir Ken Robinson, this is not the way forward. In e recent speech, Robinson intoned: 


"We still educate children by batches. We put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there an assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is their date of manufacture?" The entire video can be viewed here.     


Michael Shaw, editor of TESPro, suggests that a new form of teaching - vertical teaching - can be an improvement on the failing state school factory model of batch processing by age. He does caution however, that extreme versions of the 'stage not age' education approach can result in "16 year olds being sent to university and infants sitting GCSEs." He doesn't elaborate on why he thinks that would be such a bad idea though. Shaw argues that schools continue to teach children in year groups simply because it is practical. Yet batch processing children by age leads to the inevitable issues of differentiation such as having to maintain ability sets within year groups. It also leads to demotivation, stress and a number of other negative outcomes. Whichever arguments we subscribe to, it is clear that children deserve to be educated according to their abilities, not according to their age. As it stands, the factory model of education little to provide for the needs of society, and it certainly fails to provide personalised learning for the children in our care.


Image by Freefoto


References


Negroponte, N. (1995) Being Digital. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Toffler, A. (1980) The Third Wave. London: Pan Books. 


Manufactured education by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.