Monday, November 06, 2006

The Social Software Tsunami Watch

The more I read, the more I see, and the more that I talk about social software, the more I feel that a tsunami is coming and educators are just not watching the horizon. It isn't just that children as young as 5 have e-mail addresses, and more and more kids are maintaining their own websites and blogs, or that Ratemyteachers.com has almost 6 million postings about 900,000 teachers covering almost 85% of North American schools. And it isn't just that I'm astounded by the number of primary and secondary school teachers who are working in social software and exposing their students to the world, or that I'm woefully disappointed in the slow take up by college and university professors). I do worry about the future of higher education as these students start to arrive on campus in the next 5-10 years. I worry that the millenial students will feel that the campus is so woefully inadequate and the learning experience so out of touch and authoritarian. I worry that we could have done so much more for them, with the tools and approaches available to us, yet chose to continue with the same old - old approaches, old language, old learning models, bound by copyright and software license. They'll enter the campus expecting the world, and we'll offer them a provincial gated town with limited access to the world. I'm worried that we will rein them in, contain them, and stifle the curiousity,creativity and connections they have cultivated throughout their lower grades. But really, they are resilient, and there is a social software world awaiting them beyond the walls of the campus. They will survive. It's us I worry about - at least those of us who fail to see the wall of water before it is too late.

2 comments:

David Richardson said...

I work in the university world … and I recognise the picture you paint here. John Naughton addressed the Society of Newspaper editors in the UK last week, and made some very cogent comments about the difference between the older generation and the younger generation on-line. You can read the full article here:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1945553,00.html

I like the way he finishes:

"These are the future, my friends. They're here and living among us. They're not very interested in us, and I'm not sure I blame them. The best we can hope for is that one day they may keep us as pets."

I'm not totally pessimistic, though. I think there's a 'ketchup effect' going on in the university world (you know, you shake and shake and get nothing, and then it all comes out at once …). We've ploughed so much cash into the development of ICT-based systems … but the return has been virtually non-existent. Then someone comes along with a model that others can follow, and suddenly all those systems and all that thinking come into their own.

michael hotrum said...

Thank you for that input David, and link - frokm my days as a consultant I recognize that change is slow yet gradual; my enthusiasm sometimes causes me to push too fast. Howevere, it is sad to see such opportunity missed - with social software today we could make small inroads that could be conduits for big change later on. I just hate to think that in the interim, schools will sign onto a licensing contract with a large LMS company and then be unable to consider alternative learning design.