Mark Pesce has offered us a deeply thoughtful and sometimes disturbing look at how the Internet is evolving to meet the needs and expectations of the mob, at the expense of the hierarchy.  As he says: “The net regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around it.”  By asserting that the mobis larger, smarter and stronger than any institution, Pesece describes a net that is organic and which actively works against censorship, control and order. Cool, but…

where does that leave schools (as we understand them).  Can you name a more highly centralised, controlled and censored environment on the planet (short of prison)?  While knowledge and content is being happily democratised in the online world, and while young people create, distribute and consume media of all sorts without so much as a thought about who controls it, schools continue to package knowledge into pre-prepared, bite sized and tasteless peices of knowledge-lite.

Our struggle therefore, is two-fold:

  1. We must use the net to our own advatage by providing opportunities to create, publish, solve and share in real and meaningful ways; even if this means confronting the chaos.
  2. We must ensure that the world of the school does not recede from the world view of our netizen students.

As Pesce says:

“We live in increasingly interesting times.  Half of humanity has suddenly dropped in – uninvited and unannounced – crashing our private party, eager to participate in an exploration of the possibilities of human communication.  Whatever they want, they’re going to get.  That’s the way things work now… Things are going to change.”