Changing Times: From History to our Digital Revolution

Preparing the next generation for a lifetime of learning

Changing Times: From History to our Digital Revolution

Question: How in this time of the narrowing of the curriculum, the stifling of innovation, the homogenization of talent, and the tyranny of low expectations can we reverse the trend in education practices and create team-oriented learning, critical and innovative thinking, problem solving, and the leveraging of diversity?

Answer: The multiplier effect of best practices!

Copyright 2006 Alex Terego www.AlexTerego.com

Chief Editor: Leslie Rowe of www.GreatWords.net

Table of Contents
Introduction .....................................................................................1 A look at history ..............................................................................2 The philosophers ..................................................................2 The Middle Ages and the Renaissance ................................2 The Age of Reason ...............................................................3 The Industrial and Electrical Revolutions ...........................4 The Digital Revolution ..........................................................4 Our dominion over information .......................................................5 The next generation ........................................................................6 Convergence and the shifting of time and place .................6 The affects on children ........................................................6

ePrimer Changing Times: From History to our Digital Revolution

www.AlexTerego.com

Introduction
Change has always been part of the human condition. People are born young, go through rapid changes, and die. The same is true of cultures. Change is still very much a part of our lives at the beginning of the 21st century. Its just that the sheer pace of societal and technological change we are experiencing is disorienting. So disorienting, in fact, that we are tempted to make up new rules to interpret what is happening. No matter what the circumstances, it always pays to view the present through the lensor perhaps prism is a more apt metaphorof history so that we can learn its lessons and at least make informed plans for the future. The changes our western society has undergone in the past fifty years or so, and the even more jolting changes of the past ten years, have given us little time to pause to consider our options. At the same time, it is tempting to think this seismic change the one brought on by digitization and high speed communicationsis unique in human history and needs unique solutions. But in order to know if we need to invent new reactions to new realities, or whether the old tried and true formulaic responses to change will do, we need to look backwards. So, here goes! Take a deep breath as I try to give you a very concise look at the changes we humans have endured and how we dealt with them. Remember, if we do not learn the lessons of history we will repeat them, so here is a look in the rear view mirror.

ePrimer Changing Times: From History to our Digital Revolution

www.AlexTerego.com

A look at history
Even a brief look at human history finds it is littered with examples of changes and their aftermathmany times sudden and violent, many times slow and insidious from which we can draw lessons. Revolutions in human behavior are nothing new. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, in revolutionary periods of change similar to today, the seminal discovery by our remote ancestors of a way to control fire changed everything for them and for us. So did their invention and use of tools, farming, and city living. In the fourth millennium B.C, however, it was the invention of literacya way to mirror the human mind and spiritthat changed society in a way that we can now most readily comprehend. Ironically, it started in what is now Iraq, then called Mesopotamia. To fully assess the impact of the invention of writing, imagine for a moment a world without writing. This illiterate world would be devoid of culture as we know it. The subsequent momentous changes and great leaps forward that literacy made possible would not exist; changes such as cities, farms, and technology. Perhaps most importantly, that huge change in first millennium B.C. Greece could not have happened without writing. Those first philosophers (literally lovers of wisdom) began to use their literacy to create the next profound revolution.
The philosophers

Philosophers used their skills of thinking, observation, comprehension, reasoning, and communication not to make war or trade, but to try to make sense of their world. These bold, brave, curious philosophers examinedwithout benefit of telescope or microscopethe visible and invisible world that they apprehended with their senses and intellect. For the first time in the West, they demonstrated the power of inquiry. They memorialized their findings and conjectures in frozen speech, and thereby changed the world of their descendants forever. You have been impacted by their thought just by being an American citizen; Jeffersonian democracy is the direct intellectual descendent of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, men the founding founders knew well.
The Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Sadly, in another kind of changethis one for the worsethe work of the Greeks and that of their imitators, the Romans, was largely forgotten for fifteen centuries. It wasnt until the latter part of the thirteenth century that another revolutionthe Renaissanceexploded in central Italy when writers, painters, and architects such as Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Giotto rediscovered the ideas, writings, art, and thought of the Greeks and Romans.

ePrimer Changing Times: From History to our Digital Revolution

www.AlexTerego.com

The one-thousand-year-long era between the decline of Rome and this rebirth in Tuscany has come down to us as the Middle Ages. The image-laden word for this periodMedievalhas all the connotations of an age of ignorance, prejudice, and violence, when literacy was devalued and forgotten. Life was nasty, brutish, and short in a world lit only by fire as historian William Manchester puts it. As an aside, my hope is that the 21st century will not see the advent of a new version of medievalism, however, some signs are already pointing the way. Many world leaders are leading us backwards to an age when uninquiring, unenlightened blindness was considered the only way of life possible. It was an age when science and inquiry were to be feared and seen as incompatible with religious faith. Historically, one human-inspired revolution typically builds upon the changes that went before and adds its own wisdom before passing on an enhanced version. Sir Isaac Newton claimed that if welike himstand on the shoulders of those who went before us, we shall see further. Again a good question to always ask is this: are we standing on the shoulders of other revolutions, learning lessons from them and in so doing becoming farsighted? In 1450 during the Renaissance, the German rediscovery of printing with movable type (the Chinese and Koreans were first by a thousand years) launched another revolution. It made books more plentiful by moving us from laboriously hand-written copies of religious works transcribed by monks in Latin and Greek to the printed page, and launched a new phase of the Renaissance. Italian, German, British, and French writers had created plenty of ideas in the flowering of the Renaissance, and these ideas were ready and waiting for a technology that could convert them into an easily distributed form. But people had to learn to read first. In another sea change, books in vernacular languages began to be written to accommodate the demand, and literacy became a prized skill. Books had little value until people learned to read and eventually write them. And they didand books became commonplace relatively quickly as literacy spread and scholarship was distributed across cultures. Of course, for a long time scholarship was restricted to the only meaningful subject matter of the time: theology.
The Age of Reason

This was the case until the 1600s when yet another revolution swept over Europe. The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment dawned and scholarship became even more secular and mainstream. Intellectuals, as is their wont, reacted to what had gone before and decided for the first time since the Greeks two thousand years earlier that their minds, plus the scholarship that went before, gave themnot the churchaccess to all the answers. The perfectibility of man through reason and science became the goal. Now science was the new religion.

ePrimer Changing Times: From History to our Digital Revolution

www.AlexTerego.com

The work of the Enlightenment scholars made the next revolutions inevitable. Their work had led to an understanding of mechanical processes, physics, the roles of citizens and government, the workings of trade, and most importantly, self-interest as the engine of a market economy.
The Industrial and Electrical Revolutions

This in turn led to the Industrial and Electrical revolutions, which were all about leverage; squeezing the most out of the least, whether it was workers, technology, resources or relationships. This was the revolution that finally forced the ruling elites to legislate the education of the masses, which they did. They did so not out of any altruistic impulses, but out of enlightened self-interest. Shops, factories and the colonial administration of the time needed literate clerks, not literate clerics. Charles Dickens was one such literate clerk. For those of us who divide history into before computers and after, the story begins with Charles Babbage (1791-1871), an English mathematician and engineer who invented two mechanical computers. When I was a young man at IBM I had a sign on my desk that said. What hath Babbage wrought? This was a play on the first telegraph message sent by Samuel Morse, What hath God wrought? In other words, what have we gotten ourselves into? What indeed! Well, it turns out that we didnt really get ourselves into much trouble until the transistor was invented.
The Digital Revolution

Over six thousand years after writing was first invented, along came Alan Turing and William Shockley, and the Digital Revolution they unleashed. They launched the digital predicament we all find ourselves in. Turing (19121954) was an English mathematician who in 1936 wrote the first precise theoretical description of an electronic computer. Then, in a second prodigious accomplishment, he went on to help win WW II by breaking the Nazis Enigma codes. In 1948, the American Shockley (19101989) and his team produced the first semiconducting transistor in Silicon Valley. Turings theoretical computer finally became practicable, and continues to be perfected by companies that are now household names and whose refinements bring us closer to digital Nirvana or anarchy, depending on your point of view. This Digital Revolution is now almost sixty years old and has now brought us unprecedented leverage over information. This change has been made possible by a series of smaller revolutions in the past forty years, to do with smaller and faster processors, digital communications, and the storage and retrieval of information. These advances have all occurred with decreasing time intervals since Shockleys time. They obey Moores Lawnamed for one of Intels founderswhich accurately predicted the computers constant lowering in price and improvement in performance that we have all seen and benefited from. Also at work is Gilders Law, which promised and delivered ubiquitous, cheap, and fast communications

ePrimer Changing Times: From History to our Digital Revolution

www.AlexTerego.com

Our dominion over information

The Digital Revolution in which we find ourselves is the latestand surely not the lastin a series of great leaps forward. Each one builds on the lessons of the successes and failures of the ones before, and each one becomes ever more necessary and consequential to those whose lives are affected mostthose of us living though it. We will be judged by our descendants on how well or badly we handled this gift of dominion over information; did we handle it selfishly or altruistically? Our Digital Revolution is not like the other historic revolutions. It is a Perfect Storm. By this I do not mean that the choices, problems, and opportunities that this confluence of technologies has created are much more fundamental than, say, the Industrial-Steam-Electrical Revolution of a century and a half ago. It would be difficult to imagine a more serious disruption of life that change caused, as commerce and trades unions swelled and people depopulated the land en masse and became city dwellers in Dickenss and Poes time. No, the difference between that event, which took most of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries to unfold, and todays digital impact event is the compressionsome would say the rendering irrelevantof time and distance, and the changing concepts of place and identity that have accompanied it. The first part of the digital agea time dominated by the mainframe computertook up the majority of the past sixty years. These huge machines, which had more in common with printing presses, were replaced first by mini-computers, then the micro computer. And then, in a series of lightning-fast developments, these machines were tied together by telephone lines; first in a dial-up mode and now by connections that are always on, moving data at the speed of light through terrestrial lines and satellites.

ePrimer Changing Times: From History to our Digital Revolution

www.AlexTerego.com

The next generation

The question remains the same: are we standing on the shoulders of those that have gone before and adding our own wisdom to humanitys historical wisdom, or are we looking wistfully backwards? As usual, the answer is that some are and some arent. In terms of how all this impacts the education of the next generation, we are in a dilemmaa serious dilemma. All this history means that our children, who like us are necessarily the next inheritors of all the revolutions and knowledge that have gone before them (and who probably do not know what a mainframe computer is, let alone its historic value), are now growing up in a networked or wired world; a world of continuous computing. It is a world where their desires and those of suppliers are the same: ubiquitous access to information and other community members. Lots of media content is already easily available and more is inevitably on the way. And in a huge shift, much of the new information is being published or generated by the members of this worldwide, wired, virtual communitynot by media organizations.
Convergence and the shifting of time and place

Advances in communications, hardware, and software now allow access to people and information from anywhere, anytime. And by the way, dont keep me waiting and dont make me pay for it. I want anything, anywhere at anytime and free. Businesses are falling all over themselves to provide this. They call it convergence; the next big thing. And now theres something called timeshiftingyou know it as Tivowhere the time you view something is chosen by you, not the content provider or broadcaster. And there is also something called placeshifting, where you chose the location from which you get something delivered to a device of your choosing. I call it like nothing we have ever seen before. Social and economic activity will never be the same for your students and children as it was when you were their age. Privacy, identity, and security have already taken on new meanings and significance, as has anonymity. Robotics, web-enabled phones and other devices, and cognitive software assistants are changing the ways in which we, especially savvy children, find data or information. And in a recent trendand one that will growdata now find us and then turns itself into useful information. Since knowledge is power, he or she who has the best methods for turning information to their advantage wins. Wins what? This is a huge question, perhaps the question.
The affects on children

Heres the rub when it comes to all these changes: they affect children mostyour children! No matter how digitally wired a pre-teen or teenager might be, no matter how

ePrimer Changing Times: From History to our Digital Revolution

www.AlexTerego.com

much access they have to informationanywhere, anyhow, anytime, passive or interactiveit is critical to remember that their brains are not yet wired. There is no getting away from it; they are not yet adults. Just look at driving accident statistics, car insurance premiums for teens, the rise in risky and inappropriate sexual conduct among teens, risky internet behavior, binge drinking, cigarette smoking, and so on, and draw your own conclusion about what irrational impulses drive them and what controls they exercise or not. After looking at the very brief history of the major changes that we have undergone in the past, I think the main lesson has become apparent. We, as a society, had better do a better job of responding to this new milieu by not fighting the last war; that is using antiquated methods to confront, manage and take advantage of new realities. It just wont work and subsequent generations will pay the price; in fact they already are. The one fact that has not changed is this: it is still the grown-ups responsibility to design a society that will help our offspring cope with this brave new world. Because they are still children and we are not. As with all previous generations, what kind of adults they become is largely up to us: the parents, grandparents, teachers, policymakers, judges, writers and other professionals. Many previous generations have had to adapt to changing times. The horse gave way to horse power at the beginning of the 20th century. Birth control options proliferated in the 1960s, and divorce rates also rose in the 1960s. Parents and those entrusted with governance had to establish new ways to cope with the changes in social mores. In the past, adaptation was done at a leisurely pace. It might take a generation or three for practices to change in adaptation to new realities. We no longer have that luxury, and change is affecting children more than adults. Information is doubling every eighteen months and the ways of accessing that information are proliferating. Today, adaptation to change has become our new way of life. It will remain so for generations to come. Children are the living message we send to a time we will not see, said John W. Whitehead. Lets make sure it is a good message by learning from our mistakes. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Alex

ePrimer Changing Times: From History to our Digital Revolution

www.AlexTerego.com