All that time we spend watching tv, movies, surfing the web, tracking sports and playing games can be classified as passive cognitive activity. Passive activity (also known as consumption) is not inherintly evil, but the opportunity that technology offers to produce and share, instead of consume, could change the dynamics of work and learning.
Clay Shirky has made it clear that the cognitive surplus out there is huge:
How big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project — every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in — that represents something like the cumulation of 98 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 98 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.
There are millions of American’s out there spending billions of man hours on tasks that are passive, instead of active and creative. Are they just waiting for someone to invent a cause that could motivate them to start producing, instead of watching or playing?
We can harness the surplus of cognitive activity in our educational systems by re-architecting the core rules of engagement. We need to enable open, social networking systems as the platform for new educational systems. Purpose driven learning projects will take root if we plant the seeds. Thought leaders and teachers will become subject matter experts leading teams of doers, who just so happen to be learning.
Open social systems encourage collaboration and group participation organically. These systems, defined by collaborative applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia, will foster exponential improvements in learning. Group exposure to results, delivered to the group in higher quality and quantity (compared to existing systems), will add to the experience via competition and natural cognitive engagement.
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