Education for the Information Age: Networked, Decentralized, Self-Sovereign.

What does an Information Age education system look like and how do we get there? In this salon, Dominic Duffin will lead a conversation about the reinvention of education for the Information Age, through tech culture perspectives from venture capital to Bitcoin.

Dominic sees a dichotomy between the use of technology to digitize processes and systems from the Industrial Age, and the technologies of the Information Age, which create transformational change. It is the latter, and the social organization and systems that evolve in tandem with them, that characterize the Information Age. Online banking and newspaper websites are examples of the digitization of Industrial Age systems. Social media and Bitcoin are examples of Information Age systems. The basic structure of the Industrial Age is top-down, producer-consumer: companies, organizations and governments operate the means of production in a centralized fashion, and the people simply consume the results of that organization. In Information Age systems, the people can be both producers and consumers, they can publish their own content while consuming the content published by their peers, they can be their own bank and transact directly with their peers.

Mainstream education is still organized as an Industrial Age system. Large institutions dominate the production and distribution of education, and the people act as passive consumers in these educational institutions. Furthermore, the assembly-line style education that dominates these institutions optimizes for standardized mediocrity, rather than individualized excellence. The question for this salon is: What does an Information Age education system look like and how do we get there?

Sample areas of discussion include:

• How online or offline, local or global, an Information Age education system should be
• The unbundling of the services provided by schools and universities (socializing, childcare, knowledge, certifications etc.)
• What concepts like networks, decentralization and self-sovereignty look like in an education context

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