Moving at the Speed of Creativity

I borrowed a copy of George Gilder’s book “TELECOSM: How Infinite Bandwidth will Revolutionize Our World” today, and the following paragraph really captured my imagination and attention on page 4:

The ability to communicate– readily, at great distances, in robes of light– is so crucial and coveted that in the Bible it is embodied only in angels. Distance is a fundamental premise of a material world. It fell not to the force of the telegraph, the telephone, the television, or the airplane. None of these achieve true action at a distance. Transmitting a few words, a few minutes of voice, even the few filmed spectacles that broadcasters deign to bounce around the globe, serves only to remind us how bound and gagged we are– how tied to the limits of time and space that angels traverse in an instant.

These gags and ties are now giving way. When anyone can transmit any amount of information, any picture, any experience, any opportunity to anyone or everyone, anywhere, at any time, instantaneously, without barriers of convenience or cost, the resulting transformation becomes a transfiguration. The powers it offers bring us back to the paradigms of paradise and its perils, prophets and their nemeses: infinite abundances and demonic scarcities.

There is a fair bit in the prologue of the book I disagree with– I think Steve Jobs, for one, is certainly still shaping the global culture because of the dynamism exhibited by his companies (Apple and Pixar). While the era of Gates may be waning as Gilder contends, it is not clear that the era of influence for Jobs is through. And Microsoft can still redefine itself too. It may well morph into more of a gaming corporation than a computer OS and productivity suite company, just as Apple has become more of a music player and music sales company than a computer hardware and software manufacturer (at least as measured by total sales, I think.)

But back to bandwidth. We are rapidly approaching Gilder’s predicted world of infinite bandwidth. Think how recently it was that when we got online, we listened first to the characteristic beeps and clangs of modems connecting over an analog phone line. Those days are waning, and the era of high speed DSL and cable modems is here. But this era and the bandwidths we experience within it are but a blip on the historical timeline of human history. In the blink of an eye, we are going to be living in a fiber optic world of limitless bandwidth.

Think I’m exaggerating? Check out AT&T U-verse. Fiber to the curb. Fiber right into your house. This is not just the stuff of dreams. It is happening NOW. The future is now, and it’s moving at the speed of creativity. Our abilities to envision the future and imagine what it will look like, or should look like, are inherently limited by our past experiences and the schema we’ve accumulated to date in our brains. We are inherently limited, finite beings. Our communication capacities, however, are growing at exponential rates.

In the context of education, we need to think outside the box– but we have to recognize the natural limits we have. I love this quotation from the beginning of the chapter “The Teacher as Social Engineer” from the book “John Dewey and the Art of Teaching: Toward Reflective and Imaginative Practice”:

He [Dewey] remarks that when engineers first attempted to imagine a new kind of bridge, the imagination of nearly everyone was “held in bondage by habituation to what was already familiar” (MW 13:325). We, as educators, he thinks, are in many ways like most engineers in that patterns of thought about what schools are have formed our minds and that these configurations keep us thinking within the lines of what is, rather than releasing us to think about what could and should be (MW 13:323). In this context, he argues that we need educational pioneers who are, at a minimum, courageous, imaginative, assertive, experimental, creative, and adventurous if we expect to extract ourselves from the pedagogical grooves that keep us traveling familiar paths.

Of course this reminds me of both the ideas and images in my blog post from last week, “Empowering the pioneers.” We can’t simply go along with the crowd that wants to keep trudging down the same trail to the west, following the same rutted road… We can fly today, teleport actually– if not with our bodies, certainly we can with our ideas. We are living in the age of publication at will. We are living in transformational times. We should NOT let ourselves get depressed and lose heart when many around us want to stop the clock, stop progress, close the Internet and somehow force everyone into a 1950s worldview of the Cleavers– which never was as rosy and happy as it might of seemed on TV. (I wasn’t alive then, but I’ve listened to plenty of people talk about that era who were.)

We are living in an incredible era. The choice of whether or not to be a pioneer in this age is up to each individual. I agree with Dan Pink, author of “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” — we can’t accept the idea that the quality and rigor of thinking we’ve done up to this point is all that’s necessary to take us to the next level. It isn’t. We are not living in the industrial age, and our schools MUST change. We’ve got an incredibly vocal group of educational yahoos running around in our schools these days, forcing teachers to teach with a scripted curriculum and a rigid scope and sequence that flies in the face of all I know is valuable and worthwhile in the classroom. We’ve got to declare open war on these ridiculous ideas that are filling the lives of our students and teachers with wasted hours, unmemorable months of boredom, and exacerbating rather than solving the real problems we should be facing in the educational space and society as a whole. More standards and more testing will not save us, and they will not bring us the educational system our students so desperately need and deserve. Only high quality, caring, creative and passionate teachers can do that– and we’ve got to equip them with AUTONOMY and TIME so they can do the job they want to do. Anyone who came into education because they wanted to read a script needs to leave the profession and join the actors and actresses on the stage or in the movies. Education should be a creative space for artists and lovers, not a rigid space for parrots and content transmitters.

Think about how constrained and limited many teachers and students feel today in our school districts. What would set them free? Real autonomy, and more time. Can we give it to them? You bet we can. And we need to actively work toward promoting these goals.

What is holding us back technologically? Not every student has a mobile computing device. The bandwidth at school seems woefully inadequate. And the school network is so locked down, many creative applications and websites are inaccessible or not available. The statist technocrats rule the network and the legislatures, and many teachers may be losing hope.

Fear not, for change is on the way. Infinite bandwidth is not a pipe dream (pun intended), but a reality that is coming faster than most of us probably realize. Will powerful personal computing devices be available soon at less than $100 per unit? Of course. Moore’s law is still valid. It’s only a matter of time. But can these technological changes alone bring about the changes we need? Absolutely not. Most of the people in our legislatures want to impose a rigid, mandated environment of traditional education upon our students that is a far cry from the creative, dynamical, collaborative and media-infused environment in which digital natives can thrive best. It will take great teachers to provide that environment, and visionary leaders with the courage to set both students and teachers free.

So what should we do? Keep our faith. Remain patient, but persist in our efforts to engage students and teach authentically despite a system that seems wholly bent on preserving the status quo of traditional, transmission-based education. The digital natives are rising. And they are going to need leaders. Who will those leaders be? Maybe you. Maybe me. And most certainly, some of the very students you are teaching and influencing every day. They will take us into the future… a future of limitless bandwidth, where the only limitation on our communicative potential will be our own imaginations.

And I’d say that will leave the future pretty open-ended.

On this day..

• One Hour PowerPoint: A Strategy for Improving Presentations by David Jakes and Dean Shareski - 2008
• Open Minds: Open Education and Open Culture by David Thornburg - 2008
• links for 2008-06-30 - 2008
• Apple says NO to NECC 2008 vendor floor - 2008
• Nuggets from NECC 2008 (1) - 2008
• A happy iPhone user - 2007
• Podcast166: iPhone First Impressions from Devin Henley - 2007
• Podcast64: Prospects of infinite bandwidth - 2006

This entry was posted on Friday, June 30th, 2006 at 12:30 am and is filed under blogs, creativity, disruptive-technology, leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.