The Education Bazaar

Don’t miss New Yorker economics columnist James Surowiecki’s keynote on “Openness as an Ethos”….very nice. After two listens, this talk has convinced me to buy his book Wisdom of Crowds.
The connection in my mind is how collective knowledge is potentially so very powerful to curriculum development and learning in K-12 schools.

Surowiecki also says that traditional views see Open Content as inefficient, but that models are too narrow and fail to recognize the power of networks and self-organized models. Traditional models fail to realize that people are willing to labor for essentially no compensation and produce high quality results, so it assigns a distortedly low value to that kind of output.

And, he challenges our ideas about value, where innovation comes from, validity of knowledge, and what is “expertise”. The linchpin? Belief in a single source of authority versus relying on the wisdom of groups.

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