Helicopter Lessons and Hyperconnectivity

A thought provoking essay written by futurist Mark Pesce. The essay builds a compelling picture of the influence that mobile technology and social networking is having on the way young people learn. The two paragraphs below resonated with me.

You must engage. But we can not hand you a teenager and ask you to suddenly engage with them. That simply won't work. Building the bond takes time; it's a labour of love and an exercise in trust-building. The best mentors and teachers know this and practice it within their classrooms. But the classroom is suddenly everywhere. The network has swept in, swept through, and blown down the classroom walls. Educators and students are immersed in an 'educational field', something like a magnetic field, where amazing educational resources lie at tip of fingers, at the end of our hands. We may worry about the accuracy of Wikipedia, but no one argues about its impact. Anyone who has seen iTunes University, or downloaded an educational podcast knows about this 'educational field'. Education is freely available. That is not in short supply. What is in short supply – and always has been – is that moment of human contact, the connection which produces the transfer of insight, of skills, and understanding that won't come from any webpage, however brilliant, or any podcast, however well-produced.

And on the newly monikered Australian Curriculum, his thoughts echo those of our esteemed leader, Rob.

We're very lucky, because just at this moment in time, the Commonwealth has gifted us with the best reason we're ever likely to receive – the National Curriculum. Now that every student, everywhere across Australia, is meant to be covering the same materials, we have every reason to connect together – student to student, teacher to teacher, school to school, state to state. The National Curriculum is thought of as a mandate, but it's really the architecture of a network. It describes how we all should connect together around a body of knowledge. If we know that we should be teaching calculus or Mandarin or the Eureka Stockade rebellion, we have an opportunity to connect together, pool our knowledge and our ignorance, and work together. We can use our hyperconnectivity to hyperempower our ability to work toward understanding.