IT @ ISM Tech Think Blog

I’ve been writing a few things lately about the Internet as a tool for collaborating and connecting minds, both in terms of expanding educational opportunities and in the context of skills our students will need in the future. I’d like to explore another aspect of that for a moment…

I believe networked collaboration tools can serve a crucial role in other ways as well: as collaboration tools for social improvement. During the Long Now conference earlier this year, author Paul Hawken spoke of the emergence of what he calls ‘the largest movement in the world’: countless organizations working in decentralized unison to restore the environment and foster social justice.

Hawken used the metaphor of the human immune system to illustrate the inner workings of this movement, and drew the parallel that increased communication among the components of the immune system strengthens it. Accordingly, says Hawken, greater awareness of themselves as part of a movement will strengthen the social impact of the work done by all these organizations. To this end, Hawken (as part of the Natural Capital Institute) created http://www.wiserearth.org/, a portal listing more than 100.000 organizations working “Toward a Just and Sustainable World Created by Community”.

Since our students will inherit from us a world with many unsolved problems, we owe it to them to at least give them opportunities to develop (in the context of our classrooms) new skills which might allow them to better solve these problems.

Looking for a moment at the bigger picture - and I can hardly think of any pictures bigger than working towards a world that can sustain us all - this to me seems perhaps the most important reason for embracing new communication and collaboration technologies: the hope that they can make us better at solving our collective problems.

• For more info, check out Hawken’s book, “Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming“.