CTC 2005 - The Future of Work
I’m here at the Collaborative Technologies Conference at the lovely Chelsea Piers in the Big Apple. Yesterday’s sessions started with a talk by MIT’s Tom Malone. The topic of his talk, and his recently published book, concerns his contention that we are on the verge of a revolution in our work environments. Technology is starting to make it possible to enjoy the economies of scale, while also having a high degree of personalization, customization and individual freedom. His argument is quite compelling and is already apparent in such examples as Wikipedia and Ebay. Read for yourself and participate in the Wiki:
At the very end of the talk someone asked him how these factors would impact the education environment. That was the question on my mind. Interestingly he didn’t have a real answer. Professors and others currently in charge of the classroom will resist the level of change that Tom argues is coming. And perhaps at MIT, Harvard and Yale they’ll be able to hold out for a while. But it seems to me that the way schools at all levels look under this coming democratized environment will be radically different from most anything that currently exists. How about a university marketplace for course scheduling. Students would bid for the courses they wanted to take — popular courses would cost more, less popular courses would go for cheap. The professors teaching these courses would be paid according to their going price. How’s that for an idea to control costs and insure relevant course content?
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