The essence of the new world order turns on the notion of being willing to constantly learn, to learn through radical experimentation, and to learn by not being afraid of looking silly. We must be willing to make errors, step back and reflect on those errors, and even find humor in our errors. The challenge is also to find patterns, to seek the patterns in the novel ways that society and technology interact. The new world order requires us to be willing to construct fresh conceptual lenses through which we make sense of the world around us. When a child comes into this world, that’s exactly what he or she does. It is the sense of embracing the unknown, of not being afraid of it, but being curious about it. Of course, this is what every new age is about, but it is now increasingly important because of the accelerating pace of change of nearly every aspect of the world around us. We need to celebrate the curious child in each of us.

At the Palo Alto Research Center, you’ve hired teenagers as researchers to study how they learn. How are today’s young people different from previous generations with respect to learning? How has the internet affected the way they learn?

There are many differences, but here are three principal ones from my perspective: The first has to do with the increasing use of imagery. Today’s students expect multimedia where there is a rich interplay between the visual and the textual worlds or between the visual and musical worlds. They also expect visual simulations where they can tinker with the model and see what happens. In of the really wonderful properties of Web is that it honors multiple forms of intelligence—abstract, textual, visual, musical, etc, in ways that no prior technology ever has!

The second has to do with the willingness to link, lurk to various virtual communities of interest and then to enter the conversation or try things out on their own.

What you call a “bias toward action.”

Yes. And to not be embarrassed if something doesn’t work or if they ask a stupid question. Indeed, this might even set the stage for a new kind of cognitive apprenticeship—apprenticing to a virtual community of practice.

The third has to do with an expanding the concept of bricolage, the ability to find fragments of what has been done in one context, to lift them out of that context and bring them into your own context and use them in a new way. On the Web, a bricoleur is someone who not only has the ability to navigate, to discern, and to judge, amidst the variety of resources, but then to tinker with what he or she finds and use it for a new purpose. So instead of working from abstract principles, a bricoleur uses a more concrete type of reasoning — concrete even in the abstract practice of writing code. Now, one ‘borrows’ chunks of code done by someone else and modifies them accordingly to make them work in your particular context. What you really find happening, is that through bricolage young people are finding effective ways of tapping the creative expression of the community, and they take more seriously, though they don’t think of it this way, standing on the shoulders of the giants before or around them. One beautiful, simple example of this is the whole open source movement that created Linux—an incredible achievement done by thousands mostly in their spare time. Although this example has received world recognition, there are many smaller efforts where students use fragments of video clips, text, etc to compose new works or where students, for example, combine measurements of aspects of the local ecology to create a global picture of some ecological trend.

The open source movement around Linux has been going on for about ten years and has lead to the building of an operating system that challenges the preeminent power of Microsoft. In fact, a high percentage of the servers used to run the Internet today run this particular operating system. It has been built by volunteers who accrue a form of social capital rather than financial capital. These volunteers are distributed around the world and used the Internet to share their code, to comment on (and improve) each other’s code and to then to integrate it all together. It was very much a self-organizing social system facilitated by the Internet. Many of us hope that this same kind of spirit can actually be used to create high quality educational material on the Web.

This is why a complementary structure is so valuable. If the net is being used to extend what is already happening in class; then, instructors and students are back in contact perhaps every other week, and these physical meetings correct the misunderstandings that might have emerged in Web-based meetings.

The simplistic view of distance education — of packaging material and simply spewing it forth over the net — as a way to make learning more ‘cost effective’ is very dangerous. There is also a corporate history of trying to hype distance education as the solution to all our learning challenges that’s equally dangerous. There is also a sense on many campuses, by many university presidents, that the train has already left the station, and that if they don’t get on real quick, they’ll be left out in the cold.

One of the reasons why this period we’re in now is truly unique in the history of civilization is that, for the first time, students, even young kids sitting around the dining room table, are in some respects masters of things that their parents need to know.

The whole notion of authority has shifted from being one way to being situated. It used to be that the parents were the undisputed authority, and the kids were the recipients of that authority. Likewise, in the universities professors were the authorities, and the students the recipients. In today’s world, the notion of authority is more like a role that often migrates, depending on the topic.

That’s the precise analogy I use.

Really? Well, how about that.

As colleges approach prospective students, how must they account for this authority shift, for this leap in active participation by the students. Now, college Websites offer virtual tours, and real-time chats, but in what other ways might colleges use technology to invite prospective students to “link, lurk, and learn”?