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Collaborative Innovation

May 4, 2005 By Will Richardson

I’m reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman and so far (100 pages in) it’s a fascinating deconstruction of how technology is “flattening” the playing field by connecting global workers in ways never before possible. While he may overdo the metaphor at times, he makes a clear point: this is a changed world and the pace of change is only going to accelerate.

One quote that especially struck me was from IBM VP Irving Wladawsky-Berger:

This emerging era is characterized by the collaborative innovation of many people working in gifted communitites, just as innovation in the industrial era was characterized by individual genius.

Now I suppose you could argue that innovation is still in large part due to individual genius, and that the difference is that now we can share that more easily. The communities in which innovation takes place are now potentially much larger than when the barons of industry drove the ideas early in the Twentieth Century. But the relevance to the modern classroom certainly still holds, I think. We are still in a model that awards individual genius more than collaborative innovation. We focus on what the student does or knows more than what he contributes, yet in an exceedingly more “open source” world, contribution is the expectation.

We have the tools (blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc.) to teach our students the value of contributing. We can make the content we ask them to produce relevant to this new model if we as educators begin to think more broadly about what we and our students can do with that work. Our students contributions can extend beyond the system-imposed limits of space and time to audiences near and far who can find that work today, tomorrow, or ten years from now. And our students can experience the social interaction that those contributions generate as well, watch as their ideas are refined or refuted or revised. All of which teaches them what it means to be a part of the gifted communities of practice that are springing up all around them.

Students are not now a part of the “intellectual commons” as Friedman refers to it…but they could be.

Filed Under: General, On My Mind

Comments

  1. John Pederson says

    May 5, 2005 at 8:04 pm

    I just got finished watching a 4/28/05 speech that Friedman did for Minnesota Public Radio.

    http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/features/2005/05/collaboration/

    This gives an incredible intro to what the book is about. I hate to spoil the book for you Will…but I highly recommend going to watch the movie the next time you get a free 90 minutes!

  2. Terry Elliott says

    May 6, 2005 at 4:16 am

    Hate to rain on the Friedman parade, but after a year of reading him on a regular basis via a free subscription for the NYT in my freshman comp class I find only one word to describe him–fatuous. He is always on the tail end of the trend because he doesn’t think for himself. Instead he lets that finger in the wind do his thinking for him. Check out this takedown of Friedman in the NY Press: http://nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm

  3. Tom Hoffman says

    May 17, 2005 at 10:43 pm

    Heh. I just finished skimming the second half of the book, and that review is pretty dead on, Terrry.

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