Another excellent paper from CEO’s for Cities is Remixing Cities (PDF), which has lessons pertinent to many large organizations as well as smaller towns. The report has a strong focus on learning:
The current offer is that education is schooling—a special activity that takes place in special places at special times, in a system where most of the goals and curriculum are set for the student, not by the student. Attainment against those standards leads to a system of grading that has a huge bearing on life chances.
The new learning platform would offer learning all over, all the time, in a wide variety of settings, from a wide range of people. Pupils would have more say and more choice over what they could learn, how, where and when, from teachers, other adults and their peers. Learning would be collaborative and experiential, encouraging self-evaluation and self-motivation as the norms.
The principles and ideas developed for the redesign of education and learning city-wide could also apply to policing, crime and safety, health and well being, care for the elderly, carbon usage reduction and sustainability, and culture and creativity:
There is some solid advice in this report, not just generalizations, with an underlying theme of using social web approaches to address key issues. The “egg and plate” metaphor is one that I’ll probably use in the future. All in all, a good document to pass on to local municipal leaders.
It is just SO exciting to see that there actually are people seriously proposing what this report describes. And yet it’s SO disappointing to see how distant most people on this planet are from this reality. I’m planning to share ths report with as many people as possible in the hope that I can at least make them think about it and share it with others. Maybe provoke like a ripple effect for a small change on politicians’ and civic leaders’ minds. Thank you.