The NESA Spring Educators Conference earlier this month included a provocative speech by Ian Jukes about Education in an Age of Disruptive Innovation.
Ian Jukes proposes that we are living in an age of disruptive innovation that poses a particular challenge to educators. Most of us have sat in an education-centered box for our whole lives, and thus we suffer from an affliction he humorously terms Terminal PP, i.e. Terminal Paradigm Paralysis.
Disruptive innovation occurs when a new product creates new spinoff markets. For example, when first invented, the telephone needed operators, then rotary dials replaced operators, then pushbuttons enabled automation, then portable phones removed the tether, then cell phones made universal accessibility ubiquitous. Now smartphones replace many other devices -- e.g. landlines, alarm clock, and wristwatch.
Ian Jukes proposes that we are living in an age of disruptive innovation that poses a particular challenge to educators. Most of us have sat in an education-centered box for our whole lives, and thus we suffer from an affliction he humorously terms Terminal PP, i.e. Terminal Paradigm Paralysis.
Disruptive innovation occurs when a new product creates new spinoff markets. For example, when first invented, the telephone needed operators, then rotary dials replaced operators, then pushbuttons enabled automation, then portable phones removed the tether, then cell phones made universal accessibility ubiquitous. Now smartphones replace many other devices -- e.g. landlines, alarm clock, and wristwatch.
In the case of computers, keyboard
and mouse input is now being disrupted, as touchscreens are the new
normal. We must try to imagine what the post-PC future will be like.
Music players are another clear
example of disruptive technology in recent times -- from wax
cylinder, to gramophone disc, to LP record, to cassette tape, to
8-track cartridge, to CompactDisk, to MP3 recordings. Every
successive generation of music players disrupted and displaced the
previous technologies, and changed the way we listen to music. These
disruptive innovations put many products and companies out of
business. But understand – it's not personal; it's just simple
market dynamics.
Cameras change: Kodak Corporation
filed for bankruptcy; they were tied to old ways of thinking about
film photography.
Banking: ATM and laptops now provide
anytime-anywhere financial services, reducing the need for bank
tellers.
The revenue from classified ads
supported newspapers, but the ads have now gone online to craigslist
and eBay, thus forcing newspaper companies to cut back.
One way of bringing this concept to
a more personal dimension is to pause and consider: What are some of
the technologies and online services that changed each of our lives
in the last ten years?
Ian Jukes proposes three core mandates
of education:
1- Acculturation of the individual. It
is the foundation of democracy.
2- Appreciation of the social,
aesthetic, philosophical, moral features of personhood and
citizenship
3- Preparing students for their life
beyond school: how to learn, how to work, and how to adapt.
If we accept these three mandates
for education, then we must prepare for disruptive innovation, as the
future will be fundamentally and exponentially different from the
world we grew up in. Note that there is a ripple effect,
particularly in the ways that information is created and
disseminated.
In one illustrative example, a
promotional video2
from The Guardian Newspaper humorously illustrates the ripple
effect of new ubiquitous media sources on what previously would have
been ignored or subsumed over time into a children's fairy tale. The
recent viral spread of the Joseph Kony video3
was a vivid example in real life, replete with upsurge of concern and
backlash of criticism. Unlike previous generations, we can now make
our voices heard immediately, from the comfort of our own living
rooms.
This phenomenon affects education,
as our students are likely to respond immediately online, and check
online at every step of their daily life.
Further examples of the disruptive
disintermediation brought about by new technology are the recent news
that Best Buy is shutting many of its stores, and Encyclopedia
Britannica will no longer print books.
Our generation's classrooms and our
own education prepared us teachers to be “Information Delivery
Systems;” but our students are in a world that provides them with
information delivered to their fingertips. The role of the teacher
thereby changes.
Jukes urges us to avoid the
temptation to pretend that our pedagogical practices are immune to
the innovative disruptions going on today. “What is happening is
not just an anomaly. We cannot just tinker around the edges. We
are going to replaced by a better system – it's not personal, it's
just business.”
According to Jukes, we should shift
from providing content to providing fluencies: solutions, creativity,
collaboration, media, and information, to make our students better
global digital citizens. He recommends the book: The New Division
of Labor.4
FirstWorld countries now have few unskilled jobs available, except
for location-dependent jobs like services. Routine cognitive work is
now outsourced -- for example, sites such as Odesk.com and
freelancer.com can assemble global work teams quickly and relatively
cheaply.
In his book The Rise of the
Creative Class5,
Richard Florida notes that the American workforce changed in the last
century, as agriculture became automated; then the
working/manufacturing class peaked at WW2; and the service
(location-dependent) class peaked at 1980; the creative class is an
increasingly high proportion of the workforce, since 1980, primarily
because of the power of personal computers.
Jobs are created in the creative
class every day. For example, Apple claims it helped to create
500,000 jobs, around creating apps, particularly the mobile gaming
industry.
How are Richard Florida's findings
relevant to educational policy? Our schools were designed for
agriculture and manufacturing jobs. But now ¾ of our workforce are
in creative and service professions. Standardized tests are
applicable for standardized work, but newer jobs are much less
standardized. Can we imagine a hiring officer stating “The job
you are applying for will require you to know long division, state
capitals, and cursive writing.”
In a similar vein, author David
Warlick wrote: no generation in history has ever been so
thoroughly prepared for the Industrial Age as is this generation6.
Unless we can change our thinking, current reform efforts will
merely preserve the traditional classroom.
Ian Jukes did extensive research for
his own book: Understanding the Digital Generation. “After
interviewing 2500 students, I find that kids are increasingly
disengaged from the classroom. This continued fixation on content and
testing is assuring the end of education.” He summarized his
conclusions into five findings:
1- These are disruptive times for
education – facing multiple disruptive forces. Education is in
danger of becoming a casualty of disruptive innovation.
2- The continued existence of the
current educational system is not assured
3- Even good organizations with good
people will disappear, if they don't understand the natural laws of
disruptive innovation: change and learn, or run the risk of becoming
irrelevant. There is no market for irrelevant excellence.
4- It is very difficult for existing successful organizations to
become dominant players in the new market.
5- This phenomenon is sneaking up on
most school organizations.
Ian Jukes leads The 21st
Century Fluency Project, and quotes Erik Hoffer: In times of
radical change, the learners inherit the earth... while the learned
find themselves perfectly equipped for a world that no longer exists.
It is time for us to hit the RESET
button – Transform, not just Reform. It is our job to lead
children out of the educational wilderness, to build the bridge so
that our children cross the gap between the present and the future.
The process of change is messy, and it doesn't happen overnight.
Monterey Aquarium is a quiet place,
suitable for meditation. There we are reminded that the Blue Whale
is so massive, it takes 3 minutes to turn around... metaphorically
parallel with our school system! But the aquarium features a school
of sardines that somehow turns around immediately. Simply because a
committed mass of 10-15% of sardines change direction, the whole
school changes.
Jukes urged us to become Committed
Sardines, and change the direction of our school. What can we do to
better prepare children for the future? According to Mr.Jukes, we
can go to fluency21.com, and find the button CommitMe, then we can
read the book: Literacy is not enough, 21st
Century Fluencies for the Digital Age.7
Jukes humorously concluded “If you
grab people in the right places, they will follow you anywhere.”
This presentation grabs us right between our Teachers College guilt
about our eternal inadequacies as educators and our consumer anxiety
about catching up with the latest product. Not only are we lost in a
babble of technology terms and proliferation of hardware and software
products, we are reminded that our students are so-called digital
natives whose brains have adapted to receiving multiple stimuli
at all times.Although his keynote presentation was patently
inspirational in nature, with few practical applications to the
classroom, Jukes' talk encourages us to stop and think more
strategically so as to adapt to the inevitable-yet-still-unclear
change. We trust that such strategic openness will ready us to
recognize that change and will also help us better prepare our
students for that future. Openness and self-reflection are
themselves part of the toolkit our students will need. To some
extent, these are characteristic of the American liberal arts
education. Would that we celebrate and strengthen those aspects of
our educational life, so as to encourage openness to new ideas and
continuous reflection on our ability to use those ideas to build a
better future.
1Keynote address by Ian Jukes at NESA Spring Educators Conference 8:30am, 01 April 2012
2Two-minute
video advertising The Guardian Newspaper's thorough coverage
of issues, at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2012/feb/29/open-journalism-three-little-pigs-advert
3Thirty-minute
Kony2012 video submitted by InvisibleChildren.com to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc
4
The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are
Creating the Next Job Market,
by Frank Levy & Richard J. Murnane ©
2004, Princeton University Press
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7704.html
5
The Rise Of The Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work,
Leisure, Community And Everyday Life,
by Richard Florida, published by Basic Books, 2002.
6http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/
Comments
Post a Comment