The Future of Learning Technology

The power of the new technologies lies in their ability to leverage the knowledge of knowledge workers both individually and collectively. Powerful solutions are driven from the bottom up, not from the top down. Top-down classes don’t leverage the knowledge value of a knowledge workforce; just-in-time, personalized solutions, aggregated in real time around the learner, by the learner, do.

What seems to be lagging is our understanding of how to use the new technologies for maximum value in a business enterprise. We have been gating the innovative value of powerful inventions by using them to drive old models of learning, using pedagogies that are stuck in an older archetype. For example, when the printing press was first invented, Gutenberg was only allowed to print a few bibles at a time because each was illustrated by hand. When the decision was made to allow the new technology to reproduce the illustrations as well as text, the printing press was able to “find its voice.” Tens of thousands were printed, the innovation within the new invention was liberated, and social transformation was unleashed. The take-away here is that no new technology was required to create transformation. What was required was a new way of thinking about how to use the technology that had already been invented.

Often, what keeps us from initially seeing the innovation within the invention is our reluctance to let go of familiar territory. About 100 years ago, when motorized trucks were first introduced, delivery companies employed them along the same delivery routes that had been set up for horse-drawn carriages many years earlier. While marginal value was gained, transformation was not. The trucks required no rest, no watering, no sleep, as did the horses, yet they were treated like horses. Their value was limited by the boundaries of a previous era. The term for them at the time—“horseless carriages”—was a metaphor from a familiar but moribund paradigm. Again, no new technology was required for the giant leap forward—only a realization of the innovative value already present in the new invention.