Redefining education

Our latest piece at the Centre for the Edge is out: Redefining education.[ref]Peter Evans-Greenwood, Peter Williams, Kitty O’Leary (2015) The paradigm shift: Redefining education, Deloitte Australia.[/ref]

When we did an Australian version of the Shift Index[ref]The Shift Index in Slides @ PEG[/ref] we saw that while Australia has a pretty good digital foundation and society seems to be adapting to the shift fairly well, we’re not realising as much value as it could be. Or put another way, while we’re using digital technology to create new knowledge flows, we’re not as proficient at realising their value.

With the Shift Index complete we turned our attention to education, as it seemed logical that education would be the most effective fulcrum to use to improve our performance.

We took the major trends from the Shift Index – the move from stocks to flows, and from push to pull – and, as a bit of a thought experiment, applied them to the education sector to see what we came up with. This resulted in a slide deck The Future of the Education Sector[ref]The Future of the Education Sector @ PEG[/ref] and now this report.

The major finding in the report is that our relationship with knowledge is changing, and consequently our relationship with education is changing. The snappy version of this is “Why remember what you can google?”. The longer story has interesting implications for the education sector as by changing what it means to be educated has all sorts of potential knock-on effects for education and educators.

The report is our attempt move the current debate beyond pedagogy and edu-tech, funding and Australia’s ranking on international league tables to consider if our changing relationship to knowledge (the shift from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows, highlighted in the report) is changing the role and purpose of education and (by extension) the education sector.

The report is on Deloitte’s web site, and I’d love to year your throughs.