4th Great Information Age

In Matt Allen's post, Reframe Your Thinking, he shared links to MIT research papers from the McArthur Foundation.  The first article got my attention as it describes the learning institutions of the future.  This scholarly research paper was questioning the traditional structures of universities.  Specifically they questioned the top down, authoritative, departmentalized model of delivery content.  Included was a reference to the HASTAC, humanities, arts, science, technology, advanced collaborative. Interesting thought as we have formed our learning institutions whether college, or secondary into content areas or departments. How will learning institutions of the future be organized?  Will learning institutions be more collaborative around ideas instead of areas of content?  How will students be prepared not only for careers and college, but also for life in a digital world for socializing, participation as citizens, or other daily functions?  Will we teach them about sharing and interacting with their learning?  Will we teach them about judging knowledge and content.  Will they know how to work around problems?  All very heady and also very interesting reading.  Our school team has been enthusiastic in our work at the GTFS 2012.  I wonder what other faculty will say to our enthusiastic efforts to create a Google domain and trainings for the Google tools.  Reflecting on the research work compiled in the McArthur Foundation paper will be helpful as the day to day work of retooling our school and thinking gets mired down by the struggle to keep kids and technology moving ahead at Colchester Middle School.  The article stated that Robert Darnton described this age as the fourth great information age following the invention of writing in 4000 BC and going from scrolls to codex in the 3rd century and the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1450.  Are these tools and our push to bring technology into our school just another educational fad or one more new initiative?  Is this as important for our students as our Google team thinks that it is?  Thanks for the articles, Matt.  This type of inspiration will be important for us as we push along our work to bring technology to CMS.