Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Good ploy: get two very smart people on stage, put them in front of a smart audience, and let ‘em run.

Smart person #1 = Henry Jenkins, professor at MIT:

Smart person #2 = Steven Johnson, potentate of Outside.in and author of several books including Everything Bad Is Good for You:

The thrust of their conversation: there’s a ton of learning going on among “these kids today” — but it’s not the same kind of learning (esp. book-learning) that’s happened in the past.

Choice tidbits:

• Jenkins got a laugh with this: “Never underestimate the desire of parents to see their children as dumb.”
• Jenkins says he hears a lot from parents who want reassurance that their kids really aren’t slackers; they want reassurance in the face of fear-based messages from the media.
• Johnson wants people to develop empirical measures for the new skills that kids are compiling — measures that will legitimate their real learning, like IQ tests and the like have done for traditional learning.
• Jenkins sees a big disconnect between the classic model of the autonomous learner & today’s ethos of collective learning.
• Jenkins: People don’t do things without a cause, or do things that are totally devoid of meaning to them. The challenge is to figure out why people engage in the stuff that’s totally devoid of interest to us personally.
• Jenkins: It’s sad that so many obviously intelligent people are forced to look for creativity outlets like fan-fiction as remedies for the lack of creativity they’re able to express in their “pink-collar” jobs. The challenge: how can we harness this intellect and creativity toward more serious things, e.g. political reform?
• Johnson: Today’s young “digital natives” are the least violent, most entrepreneurial, and most political generation since the 1950s. Pretty good, huh?
• The two of them discussed how Barack Obama’s political rhetoric (”Yes we can”) resonates much better with this generation than older politicos’ “I”-based language (”I feel your pain.”) Jenkins says that kids today say “we” much more than “I”.
• Jenkins thinks that Obama is catalyzing a movement of collaboration in the mode that Goldwater catalyzed conservatives in the early 1960s.

(This is the first of three quick-hit posts to catch up on the good sessions I attended yesterday at SXSW.)