Extended human capacity remakes the organization
Digital natives and technologies of cooperation are combining to create a generation of amplified individuals. These organizational “superheroes” will remake organizational models through their highly social, collective, improvisational practices and their augmented human capacities. These new models will thrive in a world of social networks; information proliferation, transparency, and saturation; and rapid change. As digital natives enter learning professions, and as existing educators and students become amplified, their extended human capacities will challenge traditional ways of organizing learning and will amplify schools, districts, and other learning organizations.
- How will amplified educators and organizations change the role of school in the broader community?
- What will the relationships between schools that are amplified and those that are not be like?
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Amplified individuals - those who embrace social media applications, human performance augmentations, and collaborative practices - will remake the organization of the future. These individuals are highly social, collective, improvisational and augmented.
They use social media tools to reach out and expand their social networks. Applications such as Twitter and Plazes (microblogging applications that coordinate people, place and time), Facebook and other social networking sites make social connections visible. De.li.cious and Flickr (social bookmarking and tagging) help amplified individuals filter information and share resources. These individuals engage in collective practices to create shared resources using wikis, and make sense of information with tools such as Digg or Reddit (platforms for prioritizing news and other articles on the basis of collective ratings).
Amplified individuals also experiment and improvise solutions using social media and online collaboration. Virtual environments such as Second Life can serve as shared spaces for experimenting with roles or providing an ad hoc shared space for distributed teams. They also use systems, tools, and hacks to enhance the human capacity - their memory, attention, and ability to stay alert and focused. Whether it is nutritional supplements and pharmaceuticals such as Modafinil (which increases alertness and focus) or peripheral devices such as the Chumby (which offloads data streams such as RSS news and blog feeds and instant messaging that can be potential distractions), amplified individuals look for aids to increase their human performance.
Together, these attributes enable several amplified organizational practices - open leadership and sociability, beta building, collective sensemaking, and transliteracy - that support more flexible responses to change and stimulate innovation.
- Open collaborative platforms enable distributed teams and loosely connected networks to self organize and form ad hoc structures to solve problems and implement strategies.
- By circulating resources openly and broadly through social networks, information tends to find the right people at the right place at the right time that allows ad hoc leaders to emerge and apply relevant expertise more quickly.
- Such an open, flexible structure facilitates collective sensemaking - a practice by which knowledge and expertise that may not have been visible can rise in response to critical issues.
- Tools ranging from Plazes (a system that lets your social contacts know where you are, what you’re doing and when) to Moodle (an open source courseware management system) allow knowledge workers, educators, learners to form their own smart mobs and self-led teams.
- The transparency of these systems also helps support a culture of beta building - rapid innovation, in which participants of a social network, distributed team, or smart mob can see information, offer critique, and help iterate solutions and strategies.
- Amplified organizations will be transliterate - capable of communicating across multiple media in ways that use specific media platforms and non mediated, face-to-face interactions to develop effective and creative messages.
Implications for Learning
Educators adept at working with these tools and practices will self-organize around learning opportunities, share and remix learning resources, and adapt quickly to meet diverse learning needs.
- They will be able to adapt to change resource environments and the uncertainties of learning deserts (geographies lacking immediate learning assets).
- As educators collaborate with students using these practices, pedagogy becomes participatory - students become necessary agents in crafting the learning process. In many ways, amplified individuals, organizations and their practices are enabling pedagogies born in the early 20th century that have not been able to find expression in the current educational system.
- Many educators venturing into the amplified world find that modes of learning using social and collaborative platforms are downright inspiring - encouraging the reasons that they chose to teach. Also, many educators are already engaging in these practices - developing innovative practices using Moodle, wikis, edu-blogging, Ning, and other open educational resources like OER Commons, Curriki, Teacher Tube, iPod University and a host of others. They simply haven’t found the structure or support in the current educational system to function fully.
- Educator literacy in social media is a must in the next decade. Social media provide ways to connect with today’s students and release the collective creativity and intelligence of various learning agents globally. However, education decision-makers must work to close not just the digital divide - access and familiarity with digital technologies - but also the participation gap - comfort engaging in a culture of contribution, connectivity, sharing, and massive collaboration.