Disruptive Learning: No Excuses

While so much knowledge and information becomes quickly
dated these days, there are still many items out there that I find of perennial
interest. One of these is No Excuses:
The Power of Knowledge, a brief 2004 article from Jonathon Levy of the
Monitor Group. In it Levy makes the case that online learning technologies can
have significant social impact and that developing companies may, in fact, be
better positioned—or at least more determined—to embrace some of the newer
technologies than well-heeled corporations. Levy relates the story of a very
determined group of students at Myeka High School outside of Durban, South Africa:

The students, highly motivated to end generations of poverty
under apartheid, desperately needed computers. Local business donated machines,
but there was no electricity in the town, nor was there a river nearby. Solar
power was too expensive. All they had was themselves and their creativity. A
group of students and teachers conceived of a unique solution: they rerouted the
school’s 16 toilets to a large tank that generates methane gas. The gas
supplies fuel to a generator that powers the school’s 20 computers. Their computer lab operates for five hours every day. They
also use the resultant clean compost in the school’s vegetable patch, where
spinach and carrots are cultivated to help feed scores of AIDS orphans at the
school.

This is perhaps the stuff of a Frank Capra movie (in some
parallel universe in which Capra ventures outside of white, middle-class
America), but it would take a truly hardened educator to not be moved by the
example. Levy argues that the combination of intense need and the lack of
legacy infrastructure may in fact lead to some of the most innovative and
high-impact uses of new learning technologies:

…while much of the thinking around just-in-time learning is
aimed at knowledge workers in industrialized nations, such integrated knowledge
systems have profound application in less-developed nations as well. There, the
need is great and the traditional academic infrastructure cannot move quickly
enough to keep up with the demand. An entirely new “disruptive model” of
learning—just-in-time learning—can help those nations leapfrog past the
industrialized nations, where corporations have huge sunk costs in older technologies
that mitigate against imaginative futuristic solutions.

I put the efforts of OneWorld TV, which I have written about in this
blog, in this camp of “disruptive” learning models. Back when users in more
developed nations were complaining about Internet bandwidth being insufficient
for effective use of video, OneWorld users were quietly sharing their stories
and knowledge with the technology that was available—well before YouTube came
along.

I’d like to collect all of the examples of disruptive learning
that can be found. If you have one, please post it.

Related posts:

1. The Blue Sweater: A Learning Journey

posted on June 26, 2007