As a thought experiment, say we took the pieces of what we put under the category of education, and we scrambled them around on a table like MahJong pieces. Then we might look at the whole table, and try to assemble something new out of all those pieces. We wouldn’t know what it was going to look like in the early stages…but we’d have some ideas to start with, and we’d iterate and adjust, and at some point have something new.

We are currently distracted by “immense and unregulated concentrations of online power and control”, which create serious challenges and “trouble” for users. Such has changed some of our “future tech optimism” into “future tech pessimism”. However, we need to keep working toward that “something new for education” (and healthcare)  presuming it will use the power of cloud communications, AI, and perceptive addons and extensions in very useful ways. 

One way to keep on that road to the future is to explore what happens when cloud tools restructure an individuals’ and a communities’ relationship to the educational economy as a whole. Big data combinations with advanced algorithms can set up entirely new ways of using an asset, such as a car or an apartment. (Uber/ AirBNB). What those mean for society and our economy have yet to be sorted out, but there’s at least a model of new relationships to work from.

If one considers that teachers accumulate assets of resources and capability, and that their economic relationship to those assets can change if a new context is created for them…we would be at that starting point above with the pieces spread out on the table waiting for assembly.

One way to assemble the assets is described below as Teacherpreneurs, teachers who use cloud tools to participate in a “market” for their assets and resources. In the article  below, the discussion is of marketing “lesson plans”. But teachers have a LOT of assets we might not recognize as such, as they are presently subsumed/ frozen into giant bureacracy, Which creates  “illiquid assets”.  One might imagine a time when teacher’s unions sought to unfreeze teacher assets, and create markets for teacher’s skills that were then liquid, and free for teachers to market and combine in new ways.

Kudos to Gary for the link.

[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/How-former-teachers-are-making-100000-or-more-and-how-you-can-too.pdf”]