Planning is obsolete. Coordinate instead.

Teamwork, Motivation, and Education.

One of Ken Robinson’s criticisms of Higher Education is that traditional models isolate students, evaluate them all individually, and create a “disjunction between them and their natural learning environment.” He points out that in a school students are expected to do their “own work,” or risk accusations of cheating that would, outside the university, be called collaboration.

By contrast, working in teams should be one of the most important learning objectives of the education system. Instead of scaring students into isolation, educational institutions would serve their students better by structuring environments that encourage them to work together — particularly because new information communications technologies (ICT) allow people to work collaboratively more effectively than ever before.

The fact is that, when free to act from their own motives, many people love collaboration. In this video, Clay Shirky introduces us to the idea of “cognitive surplus” — which is a term used to describe the otherwise idle hours that people are willing to apply to solve real problems in collaborative settings. This violates what is understood to be conventional economic wisdom —…