Education shifts, time-location becoming a process

He's learning, are you?

When we thought about education, we used to think about a building, some brick and mortar place where we went to sit on a bench and acquire stuff from 9AM to 4PM. Some DIYers used to go to the library to do it on the side, and that was pretty much the end of the story.

Fast forward to today. Learning is everywhere. We have a new gadget every month that we have to get used to. New tasks to master at work every other day. Society changes at a rhythm needing constant adaptation to. Globalization transports the big next thing all around the world. The internet brings knowledge to us at a speed unknown to the last generation. Our cell phones will close the gap between cyberspace and alwayspace. The line between learning and the rest of our life is gone.

What’s the place for education “as we know it” in all that? Nowhere.

Our schools worked for two reasons. First, we had to all be at the same place at the same time to communicate, this is over. Today’s communication tools shatter the gaps between us. We can talk to anyone anywhere without any troubles or costs. Second, we had the assumption that what we learned once was enough to go through an entire lifetime. Now we have to start over all the time. Stuff, ideas and systems get obsoletes by the time they’re put to use. We have the power and the necessity to learn in a process way, we are not constrained anymore by time or location.

We have internet schools, education in the work place, plans for continuous improvement during our careers, asynchronous communication between students and teachers, the list goes on and on. And still, it’s just the beginning. Stuff that at first look seems to be just 2.0 versions of old stuff – like thinking that Wikipedia is just an encyclopedia on the computer – are radically altering the way we interact with knowledge.

The future belongs to schools and organizations that will jump the wave and offer us new and interesting ways to access the information we need in our new lives. The internet is not just a virtual classroom; email is not just digital snail mail. That transition won’t be easy. “Doing what used to work, but faster” seems logic, but it’s not the right path. Those that will take the “let’s build something once impossible to create” way won’t all succeed, but they will push the limits of what we think we can do as humans. And this is where you want to be; otherwise you’ll get on the obsolete list of next month.