It’s a book by Clay Shirky, who, after only a little research, I’m surprised that I’d not heard of before. Here’s an excerpt from a rather long blog post by Shirky, “..a lightly editied transcript from a speech (he) gave at the Web 2.0 conference..”
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus – Here Comes Everybody:
I started telling her (Television Producer) about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–“How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
Thanks to Jeff Utecht, whose Twitter post pointed his followers to this story (Gin, Television, and Social Surplus) — about how the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin. The sudden and dramatic changes that many people experienced in moving from agricultural to industrial economy was, according to Shirky’s source, a generation of people pickled with gin.
He suggests in this very interesting piece, that the sitcom, and in a broader sense, Television, served the same purpose during our shift to an information economy. The critical question is, “What do we do with the surplus of social capital, as we wake up from the television binge.” He describes some intriguing examples, but…
My question is, “What would we, educators, find ourselves with a surplus of, if we were to suddenly be able to rid our selves of the constraints that cost our time and efforts?“
Time to reflect, collaborate, be inspired, inspire others, and possibly to take a nap.
The desire to stretch and grow as a professional and individual, and the energy to actually do it.
Though I wouldn’t describe it as a surplus, we would have one of the two things we say we need more of, time with the other being money. This prompts for me the next question. How would we use it?
Would it lead to changes in classroom practice more aligned with what is being described as 21st century learning? Would it lead to actual opportunities to form the collaborative cultures necessary to create 21st century classrooms and schools? Would it result in the support necessary for ALL teachers to learn the what and how to embed technology into student learning experiences?
Now, these are questions that I know our school system would cheish the opportunity to explore. If only . . .
If we were freed from the traditional time suck constraints of education I believe learning would flourish. More professional growth and development, as well as an increase in reflective practice.
Not only time, but the support, and structure to “help” us utilize the time, lol. What if we could eliminate lunch duties, breakfast duties, study hall duties, hall duties, laundry list “this is the behavioral stuff you’re doing wrong” (standing in the hallway at the bell, dress code violations amongst students, etc.), and useless half day and superintendent day one-and-out-professional-development-sessions, and instead use the time for organized, inquiry driven, discussion, research and reflection.
What business would succeed if no time were made to encourage conversation amongst employees. How can we help our students be successful in the 21st century when our model is rooted in the mid 20th?
Argh…maybe I’m just grumpy after another wasted half day absent of any worthwhile pedagogical exchanges.
I totally get this conversation, but let me just say that I see time like I see money…use what you have, because more does not mean better. I can’t say that I do not love the idea of more time to grow and collaborate, and all the other great things that have been mentioned here. The fact remains, however, that there always seems to be someone out there who thinks they know what you should do with your time. I work for someone, they pay me, and until they really understand how important real collaboration is, any time I have inside of school hours will be taken up by what they think is important. I use our first attempt at PLC as an example here, and don’t think that I didn’t love having a district that actually gave us an hour a week to collaborate- that is great. The ideals ran high in the beginning, and we were all hopeful that our pleas for time to work together had finally been heard. We really wanted our time to be useful, but the truth is that most of us have forgotten how to work together really, and the idea of flexible groups was just too messy for the administrators to handle, and so pretty soon we were in groups not according to what we wanted to accomplish, but what made sense to someone else. Our time was being planned for us, and the district was deciding what we should produce with that time. The time I had before PLC is now taken preparing products or assigments for the time we have been given. We didn’t know what to do, and they were too impatient to give us time to figure it out. We’ll try again next year, but really the time is not mine, and more is not better. The people who need to get this conversation, don’t get it yet…how can I help them get it? That is my question:)
I’m not sure I understand the question. I think the thesis of the book is that everybody is going to use their downtime as part producers rather than total consumers. And, even as consumers they will expect to interact.
There’s no thought of educator’s getting their time liberated. Instead, they’ll be spending more time by having to monitor their students habits and contributions as producers to the web.
Hopefully, there will be some web tools that will improve the efficiency of prep work and collaboration. However, all this book is saying is that we’re all going to spend a lot more time in front of a computer screen instead of instead of the TV.
I would spend some time convincing the powers that be that we need to embrace 2.0 and not filter it.