The Shift to a Networked, Global Society

The moment we are living through, the moment our historical generation is living through, is the largest increase in expressive capacity in human history.  ~Clay Shirky

In today's world, access to information is essentially unlimited, and so information is cheap. The Internet “wipes out both the difficulty and the expense of geographic barriers to distribution of information. ‘Content as product’ is giving way to ‘content as service,' where users won't pay for the object but rather, will pay for its manipulation." 

Technology is enabling people from all walks of life to get information and authentically connect with one another from almost anywhere on Earth. Today, a semi-nomadic Masai tribesman in northern Tanzania with a smartphone connected to Google has access to more information than the President of the United States did fifteen years ago.

The ubiquitous presence of ICT has brought about some profound, long-term communication trends. Prior to the Internet, we had a lot of resources in place to support one-way, outbound communication. For example, we had television and radio, and we could publish information in magazines and newspapers. Two-way communication devices like telephones and, earlier, the telegraph had become widely accessible.

And today, since Information and Communication Technologies have become so much a part of our cultural fabric, we are experiencing two new, significant shifts in our communication patterns:

1. We have transitioned from point-to-point, two-way conversations to many-to-many, collaborative communications; and

2. The control of the communication environment is transitioning to open Internet platform providers, enabled by “better, cheaper technology, open standards, greater penetration of broadband services and wireless communication networks".

  

People around the world are becoming empowered by information. Already, over 70 percent of humanity in every country have access to instantaneous, low-cost communications and information, including political constituents, community members, teachers, and their students. And for the first time ever, the “Rising Billions’” voices will be heard, and with that, the formally unrepresented among us will become a real presence as both a producing and consuming segment of humanity.

With many-to-many communication widely available, people from all around the world can now easily update their skills to increase their value in the marketplace and learn entirely new ways to generate income for themselves and their families through online education. 

Easy access to Information and Communication Technologies is giving people around the world exactly what they need—an amplified, informed voice.

Meeting the Needs of Today’s Students in Online Communities of Practice

 Times have changed.

The culture during which the United States’ current education system was created—the industrial world of the 19th and early 20th centuries—no longer exists. We are now living in a global marketplace where innovation is powered by Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and driven by knowledge. In response to this cultural transition, private and public sector leaders are working together to determine how colleges, universities, and informal education providers can best engage today’s students in meaningful ways, improve their achievement, and enable them to develop 21st-century skills that will ensure that the United States’ workforce is well prepared to thrive in the new knowledge-based global economy.

It was a little over twenty years ago that the Internet became available to the average American, and educational leaders are now faced with the task of redefining cultural and societal norms to include the use of ICT in educational settings at every level. What many educational leaders are asking is how can they—some of whom have less experience in this new media than their students— best provide guidance and leadership? How can faculty members and Subject Matter Experts facilitate their students in the use of technology in sophisticated, pedagogically sound, and responsible ways? These are just two of the many difficult questions facing educational leaders now. Finding the answers to these questions (and many others) might begin with the acknowledgment that many fundamental characteristics of yesterday’s model of education—including the physical structure of schools and the traditional roles of both student and teacher—are not always optimal for today’s “digital native” learners. 

Institutions of education are currently being attended by increasing numbers of students who have grown up using computers, video games, digital music players, video cameras, and cell phones to gather and process the information that they use to construct their own understanding of the world. They regularly meet and interact with their friends online. Online communities have become so much the norm that the very concept of community has changed significantly. Traditionally, the definition of community has focused on proximity and kinship. Today, a new definition of community is emerging that is not necessarily place-based at all, but is more focused on a connection among community members based on a common interest. In fact, researchers now consider the strength and nature of relationships between individuals to be a more useful basis for defining community than physical proximity.  

In response to the cultural transition and new definitions of community brought about by the integration of ICT into almost every aspect of daily life, thought-leaders in both private and public institutions of learning are seeking more effective ways to meet digital natives on their own turf. More and more faculty members and Subject Matter Experts are recognizing that it would likely benefit the entire learning community to provide space where they can meet with their students in carefully implemented online communities of practice where members of the community can:

• share a common domain of interest,
• participate in collaborative activities and discussions,
• help each other out and share information,
• build trusting relationships that enable them to learn from each other, and
• develop a shared bank of resources for the community’s use that might include things like web-based tools, stories about shared experiences, and solutions that address recurring problems.

The widespread integration of ICT presents both great challenges and great opportunity to the country’s educational systems. It is interesting to consider what new levels of academic excellence might be achieved today when every member of the learning community is provided the opportunity to interact, explore, co-construct and share their knowledge within the context of new technological learning environments and in authentic communities of practice online.