SIGNIFICANT GLOBAL TRENDS are influencing our economic and social growth. the Connected School is an idea, or set of ideas, that offers a way to ensure both the opportunities and the issues presented by these emerging global trends can be addressed in Tasmania.
Essentially, our schools are our economic and social engine room. What we do at this juncture of history will massively impact our ability to stay strong in an increasingly globalised, technology-centric world.
Tasmania is in no way immune from the significant global trends that are having an impact on all our lives.
In summary I believe those global trends are as follows:
Trend 1: Bowling Alone
The thesis of US sociologist Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is that a variety of technological, social, and economic changes over the last three decades have “rendered obsolete” our stocks of social capital.
Shorthand for saying that things like television, home entertainment, two-career families, and generational changes have made fewer of us go on picnics, fewer of us join the Rotary and fewer of us to play eight ball at the local bar.
Putnam says “More people in the US choose to attend their local alley and bowl alone than actually join a team.” Across my electorate I see the ramifications of this every day: declining Rotary club membership, declining numbers at the local cricket club, declining numbers at the local church.
During the last great social upheaval — post second world war when millions of people across the world moved, thousands of them to Tasmania to work on Hydro schemes — new social structures emerged. I believe the emergence of new social structure is happening now in response to this latest upheaval.
Trend 2: Social Structure.com
Partly in response to the “bowling alone” social upheaval and partly as a logical progression of the Internet and other connectivity technology new social infrastructures are emerging, particularly amongst younger Tasmanians.
An example of new social infrastructure is MeetUp.Com, a website dedicated to linking people of similar interests — not so much across the globe as in their own local communities. MeetUp.Com boasts over a million users worldwide and provides, for example, a simple connection point for 18th century European architecture living in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs to get together and meet in a local pub. The same is true of almost any topic and most major centres. A scan of what groups are operating in Hobart using MeetUp.Com reveals little, but that is not to say the technology couldn’t be used to be develop Tasmanian specific applications for increased interaction.
As another example, who amongst the audience has heard of the massively interactive, online, role-playing, fantasy game EverQuest? No-one? Well, EverQuest has twelve million players world-wide who collectively spend millions of hours killing bunnies in a virtual world until such time they gain enough Everquest platinum pieces (PP) to buy virtual armour, castles and weapons. So what, you say?
Well, the interesting thing about EverQuest is not the nature of the game but the nature of the virtual economy that it has spawned. US academic Edward Castronova recently completed a PhD into the game and found that if EverQuest was a country its per-capita gross national product would be $2,266 — comparable to the 77th richest country on Earth and ranking it between Russia and Bulgaria.
What Castronova discovered was that in fact 14,000 people world wide are making a living out of playing EverQuest and effectively existing in a virtual world. They made a living by building and buying virtual assets in the virtual EverQuest world and then selling them for real US dollars (USD) on e-Bay. In fact, it is entirely possible to track the going exchange rate between the PP and the USD.
While I am not advocating an online games led economic recovery for Tasmania I am simply saying there are new social structures emerging both online and offline that most people have never even heard of.
Trend 3: The Generation Lap
Which of course leads us to perhaps the most obvious global trend. The Generation Gap of years ago has become the Generation Lap as the Net Generation of under 25 year olds lap their parents and teachers in terms of their understanding, use and exploitation of technology.
The Generation Lap, first coined by futurist Don Tapscott is radically different from its predecessors. Not just in its demographic muscle, but it is the first to grow up surrounded by digital media and it is through their use of the digital media that the Net Generation will develop and superimpose its culture on the rest of society. Baby Boomers stand back. Already these kids are learning, playing, communicating, working, and creating communities very differently than their parents. They are a force for social transformation.
There is nothing more important to parents, policy makers, marketers, business leaders and social activists than understanding what this younger generation intends to do with its digital expertise.
Trend 4: The Creative Economy
One of the things the Net Generation is bound to do is participate much more significantly in the Creative Economy. Those sectors that we could logically include in a definition of the Creative Economy such as architecture, script writing, digital media, music, art, craft, design have been growing globally at 12% for the past 5 years. If Australia manages 3% growth over the next five years we will be doing well. So, surely for Tasmania to prosper we must continue to build up the successes we are already having in these industry sectors. Creativity can be a key driver of commercial advantage and sustained business performance. Firms and indeed whole industries can compete through creativity, leveraging ideas and innovation to generate real growth.
John Howkins in The Creative Economy reminds us that “it is likely that the world’s intellectual capital exceeds the value of its financial and physical capital. In other words, the intangible value of what we have created may exceed the value of the physical material that surrounds us”. Howkins claims that 1999 was the first year in history that the value of scripts and scores performed on Broadway was in excess of the value of the buildings in that precinct. That trend has continued to accelerate for the past 6 years.
Trend 5: Business Webs
Growth in Creative Economy sectors is not best served by old corporate structures. Donald Tapscott again argues “The new economy is a molecular economy. The old corporation is being disaggregated, and replaced by dynamic molecules and clusters of individuals and entities that form the basis of new economic activity.”
Business Webs are fluid congregations or collaborations of businesses that come together loosely or in highly structured networks to accomplish shared agendas. Business Webs are partner networks — producers, suppliers, service providers, infrastructure companies and customers — linked digitally to produce shared wealth.
Whatever their form — agora, aggregation, value chain, alliance or distributive network — these digital networks challenge traditional approaches to management and business strategy, and perhaps ultimately even the roles of business and government.
I would argue that business webs are the new model for wealth creation in the Creative Economy and that participation in business webs is not optional. To succeed in the creative economy, every employee, entrepreneur, and manager must embrace a new business web strategy agenda. I would also assert that Tasmania is uniquely and strategically placed to more rapidly develop these Business Webs than other states due to our highly connected communities and the fact that the old adage that “small is beautiful” actually rings very true in the Creative Economy.
Trend 6: Trust
In the 1930s Nobel Prize winning economist Ronald Coase posed the question that if the efficient market is king then why does the corporation exist, surely if market forces are taken to the logical conclusion then we would all be individual single market units supplying and demanding alone.
His conclusion was that Trust being the highest cost component of any transaction — means the corporation exists purely because trust is too expensive to develop if we are operating alone.
But isn’t this contrary to what I said above about the strategic importance of Business Webs? Frances Fukuyama would counter with “It is those societies that can develop Trust that will socially and economically succeed in the next century.” I think most of us would agree that intuitively Fukuyama sounds correct.
If we think about what Coase said back in the 1930s, as technologies such as the Internet and EFTPOS bring the cost of any transaction down dramatically, the cost of Trust actually remains highest and continues as an overall proportion of total cost to rise.
This brings us full circle back to Bowling Alone: If we are joining Rotary less and we are building Trust through membership less than ever before, how are we to exploit the opportunities presented by the Generation Lap and the Creative Economy?
This is a fundamental question for Tasmania.
What if?
If school is the social and economic engine room of our community then the “Connected School” must accept these global trends and exploit or address them to ensure our engine room continues to serve us well. I have chosen the word “connected” very deliberately to mean many things.
So what if we designed our schools as connected schools?
What if we designed schools as a social anchor? The school would be a meeting place, a hub, a physical place that once a student graduates — he or she naturally gravitates back to, because although all the formal learning is done the school continues to deliver social, cultural and economic value.
What if we designed schools as new social infrastructure? The school would be a flexible use environment that allowed the community in to participate and pilot new social structures. And it would allow the students out to take the structures that had been piloted, and build them in the real world.
What if we designed schools as an e-place to be? The school would be a super-connected, wi-fi, i-pod generation place to be. In fact the school would be the place that the latest and greatest technology rolled out first. It would be the place of choice for a young developer, a young musician, a young digital artist and it would deliver a better technology base than any internet café, any broadband lab and any home possibly could.
What if we designed school as an ideas generator? The school would be a place that through its design alone inspired ideas. If good architecture stirs the soul, then school architecture should stir creativity above all. It would be a such an amazing space that it would challenge anyone who entered it to respond by being creative.
What if we designed schools as an ideas harvester? The school would provide space for trialling of those ideas, for testing of that creativity. It would provide a space for an audience, not just for a drama production, but an audience of all creativity be it software, digital media, art, script writing, design or architecture itself. The school would welcome that audience because if it didn’t the creative spirit that it instilled in its students would be lost.
What if we designed schools as part of a network economy? The school would provide space for small creative economy individuals or businesses to hot desk or hot-office, to bring their ideas in, trial them on a new audience or build new ideas exploiting student creativity. Small creative economy businesses would derive value by harvesting ideas created in the school, and bringing them to the world.
What if we designed schools as a builder of social capital? The school would provide flexible, accessible space to community groups who no longer can access the community hall of years gone by. But it would be more than that, it would bring those community groups in to both exploit and enhance schools’ physical, cultural and creative resources. There’s no such thing as a free lunch: the community builds the school which, in turn, builds the community.
The Connected School
So, what would the Connected School look like? Physically, I mean.
The connected school would be open for at least 16 hours of the day, probably at least until midnight every day. It would be in use for a far greater portion of the year than previously.
The connected school would be a substantial campus that houses other public service functions, such as police, health services or public libraries and online access centres.
In addition the connected school would offer small-scale start up enterprise support in the creative economy space.
The connected school might offer low cost housing for teachers, nurses or other community leaders. The community would benefit more than three times for the investment of capital in school facilities.
The connected school would have it’s own “street life” and an all-embracing view of learning that reaches out to include the local community, and to form the heart of the community.
There would be constant flow of adults through the connected school; the facilities would be community facilities. The school would “suck in” resources from the surrounding community.
The connected school would house interactive social areas, indoors and outdoors.
The use of community mentors would be extensive, so spaces for their engagement would be required at the connected school.
Legislative changes would also be required to sort out all sorts of problems surrounding the movement of students and the community within the school.
Three Practical Ideas
This is all a bit esoteric of course. And you are probably wondering, as I was when I wrote this speech, how does all this apply today … where the prospects for building a whole new school campus on a whole new piece of land that is integrated with the community, seems remote.
I have tried to distil down some of these thoughts of the future to some ideas that might be applied now. Some of these I have seen the genesis of in schools I have visited within my constituency.
Idea 1: Business Incubator
What if the school housed a small creative economy business incubator, that provided a transition from school to creative business. A hot space area would allow living creative businesses to swap in and out of the school to both share skills and knowledge and harness ideas. Students developing digital art, could work closely with a digital artist and even bring to market some of their work. Students developing software could enhance their skills and work towards creating their own business, rather than working at McDonalds on the weekend.
Small companies and individuals working in the creative economy could access technology and human resources through the school to assist their growth.
Idea 2: The Social Incubator
Well, if you have a business incubator, why not a social incubator. Although my language here probably conjures up for you some sort of Orwellian Brave New World scenario, let me give you an example of what I am talking about.
I was recently approached by a group of young people within the African community in Tasmania. They were looking for a number of things to help them build social capital, new social structures and connections with their new community in Tasmania.
One of the things they wanted was a space they could use and call home to the group. Another thing they wanted was access to some technology so that they could build a website that would support their community here and connect with their community back home.
If they were able to use a space at a local High School to play sport that would be one thing. But what if they were able to use a space, use the technology and more particularly access the skills of the students at that school to help build their own Meetup.com? The students would build connections, the African community would learn work ready skills and build new social infrastructure that would enable them to prosper here.
Idea 3: Student Democracy Models
What if the old student executive council was re-invigorated to include some direct democracy models, where students using SMS and other technologies could vote on anything from what the canteen stocked to who should represent them on local Government bodies.
After all, more people voted in Big Brother elections last year in Europe than they did the European Parliamentary elections.
What if those student representatives took the school and its democratic decisions to local and state government, either via consultative committee or elected members themselves and ensured the student community was represented at this level?
What if the technology encouraged the students to engage directly with elected members not only within the school, but also outside the school?
David Bartlett is a Labor MHA Member for Denison. This paper was delivered to the Council of Education Facility Planner International’s (CEFPI) annual conference held in Hobart.
