Extract from Unlimited: The New Learning Revolution and the Seven Keys to Unlock It by Gordon Dryden and Jeannette Vos:
KEY POINTS:
"Cisco Systems' astute CEO John Chambers sums it up in two sentences: "The next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education. Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make email usage look like a rounding error in
terms of the Internet capacity it is going to consume."
And a Cisco advertising headline is even more succinct: "One day, training for every job on earth will be available on the Internet. Are you ready?"
To MIT MediaLabs co-founder and Director Nicholas Negroponte, that message is so obvious that I'm convinced our great-grandchildren will look back and wonder why we didn't get it.
The Harvard Business School's leading expert on industry innovation, Dr. Clayton M. Christensen, predicts that, on present trends, 25 per cent of all high school courses will be available online for everyone, of all ages, no later than 2014. By 2019, it will be 50 per cent. Hundreds of new hi-tech skills courses will be among them.
So, if education is to be The Next Big Thing on the Internet, then the world's best teachers and trainers should be leading experts in creating the innovations to power that change. But are they ready?
In a world where lifelong learning - as you want it, when you want it, where you want it - is about to become the next big growth industry, the jury is still out on how many teachers are yet ready for the change.
As Time says in How to Bring Our Schools Out of the Twentieth Century: "There's a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls - every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. 'This is a school, he declares. We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green.'"
That's not the case, of course, in business. Great corporations are continually reinventing themselves. And Apple's Steve Jobs is one who not only reinvents companies; he's reinvented three industries:
* In the mid-1970s, he and Steve Wozniak were barely out of school when they founded Apple Computer. In 1984, they started the new age of interactive computing with the Apple Macintosh. Microsoft was soon to surpass them in sales.
* In the 1990s, Jobs reinvented the animated movie industry with Pixar and its seven Academy Award-winning films like Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Cars. Pixar would eventually turn Jobs into the major shareholder in Disney.
* Then, in 2001, Apple iPod and iTunes flipped the music industry on its head."