Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Don Tapscott Keynotes our Horizon Project 2008

Just over a week ago now bestselling author, Don Tapscott, of best selling book 'Wikinomics - How mass collaboration changes everything' provided the keynote for our newest project, Horizon Project 2008.

The keynote is available on our project wiki as well as on YouTube. Here it is embedded in this post.



Don talks about the 'children of the baby boomer's' and how they are the first generation to be 'Growing Up Online' (an earlier book by Don). He describes how the baby boomer generation were passive in that they watched more television and were not actively contributing and creating to the extent that the post baby boomer's of today are.
He also talks about the need to move education pedagogically to embrace more student-centered, multi-modal ways of teaching and learning.

What I find exciting about the fact that we have a 4 minute segment of Don Tapscott addressing the project is that this has become a catalyst for conversations and further interactions all over the world. The 240 odd students in the project have also the opportunity to respond to Don via their blog posts and discuss his ideas in more detail. They can also leave a discussion point or message on the keynote wiki itself for Don to pick up. This is where the medium as well as the message contains power. Yes, we could have given the students the book to read (I did encourage purchase and reading the online chapters), however to have the author actually address and endorse the project and to highlight pertinent ideas relevant to our students cuts through into a high sense of understanding and reality. The topic becomes real, the person becomes real, the project becomes a little larger than life. This is such an amazing opportunity for all participants.

For myself I continue to read Wikinomics and try to make sense of the tools we use as 'weapons of mass collaboration' amongst other pertinent ideas. I think my favourite quote from the book is this:
"If an army marching in lockstep to tightly arranged military music is a metaphor for yesterday's workplace, the workplace of the future will be more like a jazz ensemble, where musicians improvise creatively around an agreed key, melody, and tempo"

So! creativity, the wiki workplace, and all that jazz! Way to go I say.

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