No new change required

Does an acorn need to be different in order for an oak tree to appear in several years? Does the moon need to change its gravitational field for the tide to come back in tomorrow morning? Do the hens need to stop sitting on their eggs to give them a chance to hatch? I'm seeing processes to trust without changing. Stephen is seeing a need for reforms as if the changes are not in motion:

But "education reform," more generally, is of the utmost importance, and at the core of this reform must be the enabling of freedoms in networks. This will give our students the capacities they need to change the structure of government and industry.

What if students are gaining the capacities to change government and industry by playing games, social networking and uploading videos? What if the constant immersion and interactivity in their young lives will replicate itself in the world of work and politics? What if students are getting the sense to make their future adult experiences interactive, participative and collaborative? What if the situation calls for trusting, validating and protecting this change process -- rather than initiating new changes?

People change clothes, subscriptions and vacation plans -- as if change is painless. People resist being changed, coerced and imposed upon. If we act like the change in education, government and industry is already in motion, there's no "new change" to force people to accept. Stephen says something similar:

And - as always - I think that the best way to educate our students in this is to model and demonstrate this reality, to conduct ourselves as though we already *have* such network freedoms: preserving our autonomy, having our conversations, sharing our ideas, working cooperatively.

We see us acting as if we are this free, this networked and this capable of changing societal structures. I see all this in the bounty of Web 2.0 activity. It's evident in all the online gaming. It's apparent in all the cell phone traffic of tunes, pix and text messages all around the globe. We are demonstrating the behaviors, being the change, acting as-if it's true. The likelihood of it going viral is very great. It will spread into government and industry contagiously. Education will be reformed to make sense -- once our current models appear senseless. Trust the process.

Technorati tags: emergent learning, change models, educational reform