Andrew McAfee wrote “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” in the Spring 2006 issue of the Sloan Management Review. McAfee looked at how enterprises were using Web 2.0 tools and the implications from use. He introduced the term “Enterprise 2.0” to describe these concepts, and ended up writing the seminal paper on Enterprise 2.0. So, why write about business in the blog dedicated to collaboration in education? That is the future of most of our students, whether they are the CEO or the receptionist.
I started doing more research on McAfee’s concepts to see what was happening in business and I realized that if collaboration were baseball, the best in business are playing professional baseball while most of us in education are still playing kick-the-can. We like to talk about preparing students for an unknown future but we aren’t even preparing students for the present. In education many of us are still stuck in the same rut. Yes, you can find plenty of blogs about “Education 2.0” or “Learning 2.0” or “21st Century Skills”, but we are not implementing those concepts in most cases. I realized the reason the other day in a meeting—we all believe the problems are elsewhere and it’s the other teachers who have to improve. Well, we all need to spend time looking in a mirror. Trust me, it ain’t pretty.
I will write more about what I found in a future blog.
