As described here in an earlier post, young African Americans are accessing the web 1.5 hours a day on mobile, compared to .5 for white youths. The potential here is to send failing government schools into meltdown. I know, for example, a black New York City teenager who is qualifying for a software engineering entry job online, having dropped out of an awful high school uptown.
A Napster-like knowledge network is emerging out there. Testing is arriving online too. This individual web access to learning subjects and certification is in principle no different from how kids a decade ago accessed their music.
Do you suppose that while the Obama/Duncan government take over pays off all the top down school people, that the kids will do education Napster-like and empty schools? Why not? Surely Wikipedia is a Napster of learning, as Wired Campus reported last week.
For the same reason the music industry experienced in the Napster meltdown, students are approaching a threshold beyond which they can walk out of school and learn whatever they want from the schooling in their hand. This description from Wikipedia of Napster may outline the meltdown that lies ahead for government education:
Napster was an online music file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning while he was attending Northeastern University in Boston. The service operated between June 1999 and July 2001. Its technology allowed people to easily share their MP3 files with other participants, bypassing the established market for such songs and thus leading to the music industry’s accusations of massive copyright violations. Although the original service was shut down by court order, it paved the way for decentralized peer-to-peer file-distribution programs, which have been much harder to control.
You are thinking kids just use their mobiles to play games and text. We will see . . .
