Spark 195: Pagination, Education, Participation

• Listen here
• Two main discussions of interest:  Enhancing education with technology and online collaboration. 
• Classrooms will/should become "hacker spaces" or "creative spaces" where students come together and with some guidance from the teacher, they build stuff.  This seems to make sense for classes such as industrial arts and computing science, but what about language arts (I'm thinking grammer) and social studies (I'm thinking history)? 
• The identity of "young people" today is "what I've built, shared, and what others have built upon".  Corporations will hire these digital leaders based on these attributes.  I argue that the same criteria can/should be applied to professionals currently in the IT industry
• Greater importance of imagination over creativity.  Whereas creativity is thinking about how to do something better, imagination is thinking of an entirely new way to approach a problem (thinking outside the box?)
• Rather than viewing the world as entities competing against each other, the natural way of the world may be collaboration between entities. 
• The "group IQ" of a collection of people is not most influenced by the IQ of the individuals but by the diversity of the group.  Having women in the mix also increases the group IQ
• If we look at the world we live in, if we were competing more than collaborating, would we have our cities, hockey leagues, the United Nations?  If competition was the driving force, I think it would be more of a Mad Max world, but without vehicles, since these probably would not have been invented

Spark: Interview with "Future Perfect" author

• Listen here:  cbc.ca
• Free market forces know the problem to solve and are very efficient, for the short term, but don't do well with planning long-term projects (e.g. widening a bridge in anticipation of increased traffic volumes).  This is what governments are good for.  Can decentralized peer networks plan and execute long-term projects?   
• Media likes to put one person on the cover of Time, etc. when actually the work of thousands may have contributed to X project.  This gives an inaccurate view of how projects are successful.  Projects are not successful based solely on the heroics of one person and even when a project was led by one individual, for multiple successive projects, heroics often cannot be repeated.
• Although I have not read the book, it seems that what is described is also evidenced by the success of open source software that powers the innovation happening on the Internet.  That is, source code written by one person can be freely adapted or enhanced by another developer, without patents and royalties to contend with.  This reflects the saying "[building] on the shoulders of giants".