I am constantly fascinated by the myriad “small” changes the Internet is causing in our lives and how these changes, when writ large across society, are totally transformational.   This is one of the network laws I frame as “Small is Big” – In the network all things begin small (the individual, the faint signal, the single message) and roll up through collective action (the viral pass along, the “Digg“) into a swarm of biblical proportion (Obama’s donor list of 13 million).   Here is another example. To get to this example, first take a moment to think through this exercise.   You are back in junior high.  You get a very unremarkable assignment:  Write a paper on the three branches of U.S. government and highlight how the executive branch has changed over time.  How do you complete this assignment?   If you were like me – you would:

1. Head to the library and try and find a generic reference book
2. Look it up in your home encyclopedia – and get a two page (at best) summary.
3. Ask mom and dad for their “expertise” (mine, by the way, had none but they still helped out)
4. Call your smart friend on the telephone with a plea for help

All during this assignment you are copying sections from the encyclopedia in long hand – taking notes from mom or dad – and assembling your paper. Now consider the way this same assignment was completed last week by my friend’s son Jaime.  Jaime is 13 years old. Jaime logged into Facebook and began an instant message chat with three friends working on the same assignment.  Each was using Google to find  excerpts from magazines, newspapers articles, historical archives, university websites etc.   Each friend was sharing the choice links they found via the chat window.   When Jaime found something useful he did a simple cut and paste into a Word Document that was open in another window. Now take a moment to think of how powerful this experience is – and how much it differs from how you and I spent our formative years learning how to learn.  (1) Jaime is working collaboratively, with friends and (2) accessing a repository of documents that were completely out of our reach when we were in junior high.  (3) He is multitasking across several programs and lines of communication at once. (4) Jaime simply uses cut and paste to begin organizing his draft – moving text from primary sources to his personal paper. All of this represents a radical acceleration in productivity,  and shifts working time from mindless task (copy chunks of text in long hand) to  creative and collaborative thinking (what does this text mean in relation to the assignment I am completing, what do my friends see as valuable).  Small is Big:  Imagine this shift multiplied across the hundreds of millions of students like Jaime that are working in a new way – both procedurally (computer based) and behaviorally (collaborating). This shift is occuring not only in our schools but also in our work and home life.  

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