It happened to the record industry first. While popular music had long been available on radio, it could be argued that a true music industry as we know it today didn’t arise until the 50‘s and 60‘s when distributable media and players became widely available.
But that’s where technology turned. CD drives in computers plus early sharing software like Napster meant that instead of getting good at mashing the pause button on your stereo so recording to cassette stopped before the adds kicked in, you could rip a whole CD to MP3 in minutes and upload it for anyone who was also connected to the net. You could also bypass the record stores entirely by downloading songs, for free. It meant you didn’t have to buy your music a fourth time in some other format – you now controlled the file. No it wasn’t legal, but it was what the people wanted.
Fast forward to 2013 and we can choose to buy tracks one at time instead of ten at a time. NOW we have Pandora, and Spotify and Rdio et al. Now Music gets pushed to me. Now I tap a thumbs up button and more great tunes keep rolling in, for free if I put up with the Pandora Ads like four times an hour.Given the resistance to positive change within the public education sector, change may be slow. What I am optimistic about, though, is that resistance can not last forever, and eventually individual choice will prevail, giving parents the ability to either send their kids to proper academies that take advantage of the technology, or even use the technology at home rather than send their kids off to school for most of the day. I can imagine a future in which companies such as Coursera, edX or the Khan Academy offer full curriculums for children starting in early primary education, supporting their education throughout their lives, and at prices that are affordable for even those at the lowest end of the income scale. Back before socialized healthcare, the poor were afforded care through charity, and I can imagine a future in which plunder is not the method through which education is provided, but through charity from private enterprise.
So what about the education system? I mean its truly one of the only things that everybody has in common. In many countries its 5 days a week for up to 12-18 years! Its a system where what you will learn (the content) and how you will learn it (the curriculum) is highly regulated and centrally controlled, with the user/learner having very little say in either. Its also traditionally been an industry slow to adopt new technology. The US Department of Commerce found in 2003 that Education was actually the least IT intensive of 55 major industries (Dumagan, Gill, Ingram 2003). This may be due to an in-built caution when it comes to something as important as education, or it could be a lack of funding or access, particularly in the developing world.The medium also brings with it an efficiency that public and many private institutions fail to put into practice, that could effectively cut the time spent studying in half, giving children the opportunity to focus on being children while also being students, rather than spending every waking hour dedicated to their studies.
Once flexible and even user-generated learning content embedded in MOOC’s trickles down to a primary school level, and super-capable mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are deployed widely enough to provide ubiquitous access, its really only the process we use to harness them (especially how to keep some strategic face to face time in the mix) that remains to be solved.
When these aspects are satisfactorily solved then, we are left to ask – Can we actually trust people to choose their own education like they choose toothbrushes, or say, tracks on Pandora? Sugatra Mitra who just won the $1 million dollar TED prize for his ‘school in a wall’ work would say yes. Do yourself a favour and ponder all these questions while watching his presentation here. Does it make you want to tap ‘thumbs up’ to add more like it to your stream of learning content?If kids in poverty can learn programming at a walk-up kiosk when they have never set foot in a classroom, I think that the eventual progression wil definitely be toward something decidedly less centralized, toward a more individual learning experience.
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