Joi Ito on Now-ists

This is a great TED talk. Joi Ito, director of the MIT media lab, talks about the changes that technological innovation have made to the ways that we can work on problems and work together.

I don’t agree with everything, especially the pejorative cast on education, but I totally agree that the way that we construct learning environments has to take into the way that our students will work, rather than trying to prepare them for the world that we (or our parents) worked in. Pretending that many of our students will have to construct simple things by hand, when that is what we were doing fifty years ago, takes up time that we could be using for more authentic and advanced approaches that cover the same material. Some foundations are necessary. Some are tradition. Being a now-ist forces us to question which is which and then act on that knowledge.

Your students will be able to run enterprises from their back rooms that used to require the resources of multinational companies. It’s time to work out what they actually need to get from us and, once we know that, deliver it. There is a place for higher education but it may not be the one that we currently have.

A lot of what I talk about on this blog looks as if I’m being progressive but, really, I’m telling you what we already know to be true right now. And what we have known to be true for decades, if not centuries. I’m not a futurist, at all. I’m a now-ist with a good knowledge of history who sees a very bleak future if we don’t get better at education.

(Side note: yes, this is over twelve minutes long. Watch our around the three minute mark for someone reading documents on an iPad up the back, rather than watching him talk. I think this is a little long and staged, when it could have been tighter, but that’s the TED format for you. You know what you’re getting into and, because it’s not being formally evaluated, it doesn’t matter as much if you recall high-level rather than detail.)