Wikinomics

Yesterday I finally finished reading Wikinomics. I found it fascinating on so many different levels; beginning with the subtitle: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

Several ideas still rolling around:

1.) There are and will always be, no matter what you do, large mobs of smarter people outside of your organization than there are inside. From Boeing to Xerox, the book gives numerous examples of ways that companies have developed porous boundaries, allowing them to decide what functions are best performed in-house, while handing over others to individuals outside the company who may be better suited to the work.

Implication for education - first of all, wouldn't it be great if you could outsource some of the things in your classroom (some mindless grading quickly pops into my mind) to someone else, so that you could concentrate on innovation and planning in your classroom? The second thought is that as the teacher, you are no longer the smartest person in the room. Collaborators from across he globe can be brought in to your classroom to mentor your students; and this is OK. As a teacher at this time in history, I feel strongly that our jobs are only partially about teaching. Our jobs are also about connecting. Connecting our kids to other learners and to information. How do we develop classroom structures and routines that both honour and utilize the possibility of porous classroom boundaries?

2.) Customization - Google allows its employees to spend 20% of their time on projects of their own design and development. As well, on the other side, many online businesses allow you to truly customize your experience, the information you receive, the look of a product you purchase, etc. to fit your needs and your life.

Implications for education - On both sides, customizing education could have huge implications. Imagine giving kids 20% of their day to pursue an agenda of their own that is focused on some large issue. What would they design? What kinds of questions could they wrestle with? What could the come up with? Imagine the skills of independent research, growth and learning they could attain. On the other side, the implications for us as teachers are huge. Kids simply need custom designed educational programs. While a nightmare for us at first glance, there needs to be tools that allow this to happen. For us to truly motivate and engage kids they need custom sources of information and assessment that meet their skill level and needs.

3.) Customer Tool Kits - Much was made in the book about places such as Second Life and Amazon that allow their customers to create their own wealth on the companies own platform and backbone.

Implications for education - This is pulling back the curtain and letting the kids see the wizard pulling the strings. Can we give kids more control over the "strings" of classroom life? Can they design their own rubrics and other assessments? Their own projects? What about going beyond that and allowing them to design their own learning agendas and spaces? Can we create a basic frame for the learning that happens in our space and then allow kids to use these tool kits for their own good?

Still plenty to mine out of this book which I think has great potential as a source of ideas for educating our students in new ways that will meet the needs of our emerging, peered, globalising society. Many of them are fringe ideas in business and in education, some of them are simply untried and to the point of heretical as opposed to a "traditional" educational structure. But they have been proven to work. It is time for us to re-imagine what education can be and stop looking at what it is.

Tags: wikinomics, collaboration, classroom, globalization

Comments

[Carolyn Foote]

Clarence,

Wow. I'm reading this post and thinking of a post yesterday on Students 2.0 by Dillon about the same thing, and just picturing what it would look like to have students more involved in their own learning.

http://students2oh.org/2007/12/10/the-world-wont-wait-for-rome/

What would that even look like? I think of the Coalition for Essential Schools program--with the essential questions being the large framework, and students helping to create their own pathways within that framework, for example. It's fascinating to consider what that environment would be like.

You're right, the issues would be great, but the learning would be great also. Imagine a nation of self-empowered life long learners!

I was also fascinated by your comments about seeing your role as an educator as being a connector. I don't think that most classroom teachers yet view themselves this way, but it's a profound and important shift, because it reflects seeing the need to reach beyond the classroom walls, and to me, it reflects knowledge as a living, breathing thing, rather than a static body of information.

Your post really crystallizes some ideas for me. Thanks!

[Mr. Chase]

Clarence,
Yes. I had the same thoughts and ideas when I finished the book. Here's the thing, the weird thing that would have kept me up at night, were I a man kept up at night by such things, I had no drive, no interest, no intent of contributing to the book's wiki.
I wonder if that's just me? Clearly, the authors want to continue the conversation. In some respects it feels as though they think of the book as an extended blog entry. Still, I had no compulsion to comment. Here, you commented, but did you contribute to the blog? I didn't either.
Why?
Thanks for making me think.

[Sarah]

Thanks for turning me on to this book. I commented on your comments and their application to homeschoolers at http://www.rationalhomeschooling.com