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Social tech needed to help US education keep up!

October 13, 2011 By Anne 3 Comments

I’m glad I read Seth Godin’s “The forever recession (and the coming revolution)” after being in Kenya for the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). Because, there, the revolution Godin’s talking about was right in front of my eyes and in my ears. I heard a lot of smart people from Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, and Democratic Republic of Congo representing what he writes here:

“When everyone has a laptop [or a mobile phone] and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory,” Godin wrote. “Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.” This reminds me of how intuitively East Africans seem to be connecting “virtually.” I think of Arsene Tungali of Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo. He told us in a workshop on child online protection that residents of Goma, his provincial capital in Congo, have electricity only from 11:30 pm to 6 am, so he connects with his mobile phone, which is the way so many people in developing countries access the Net. Tungali understands the personal- and economic-development power of connecting people so well that he co-founded a nonprofit organization, Rudi International, that connects and provides tech training for African youth. [Tungali said he uses YouTube, Skype, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia on his mobile phone, which is not a smartphone (the way many people in India and other developing countries are accessing the Net, doing their banking, etc.).]

Project- not job-training

Think about this when we talk about US education reform and our children’s future careers: “The new revolution, the revolution of connection, creates all sorts of new productivity and new opportunities,” Godin writes. “Not for repetitive factory work, though, not for the sort of thing ADP measures. Most of the wealth created by this revolution doesn’t look like a job, not a full-time one anyway.” That’s good, because Kenyans told me how hard it is to find a full-time job in their country – a view many Americans share about their own. Think about this when you hear election rhetoric about jobs or our children’s futures in the election season.

“No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a ‘real’ job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level playing field in which owning a factory isn’t a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.” This may well be why, as US Amb. Jonathan Scott Grayson told my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid in an interview, Kenyans spend 43% of their disposable income on mobile phones. Maybe they have little choice but to embrace the revolution, for themselves and their children.

Related links

  • Thoughts on what connection + intention mean to personal and economic development
  • About young people who are leveraging the revolution here, here, and here
  • “Do no harm: Message to educators, parents”
  • “School and social media: Uber big picture”
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Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: Arsene Tungali, economic development, Rudi International, Seth Godin, Social Media

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Arsene Tungali says

    October 22, 2011 at 10:18 am

    thank you Anna for pointing this out.

    Love,
    Arsene

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Rudi International at the African Internet Governance Forum (AfIGF) in Nairobi | Rudi International says:
    September 21, 2013 at 1:57 am

    […] online security in the DRC, a country where Internet is being used by young people mainly through mobile devices than on […]

    Reply
  2. Education's job in a networked world | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    October 17, 2011 at 2:10 pm

    […] world where school can't prepare students for jobs because jobs as we know them are going away (see this about the "forever recession and … coming revolution").] But school can’t do any of the […]

    Reply

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Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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