Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

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Dan Fost recently reported on the neo-nomads of San Francisco - new start up companies and independent coders who work on the move using wireless internet access in cafes rather than hiring office space. These workers have become known as ‘bedouins’ and see themselves as, “changing the nature of the workplace, if not the world at large”. Fost draws on Daniel Pink’s book, “Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself” published on 2001, and well before Friedman’s concept of the ‘The World is Flat‘. But these ‘neo nomads’ are yet another example of the individualisation of the workforce that is part of Friedman’s proposition.

The question is what does this form of working tell us about the way in which we should be preparing students for their future working lives? No better example was provided that at the recent ECIS IT Conference, when Julie Lindsay spoke about the Flat Classroom Project she initiated with Vicki Davis:

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in which their students in Dhaka and Georgia worked in pairs using the Ten Flatteners identified by Friedman in his book as a focus mirroring individual and team collaboration in the Flat World. The two week project won the Edublogs Award for the best educational wiki in 2006 as a result.