© 2008 John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler. Text illustrations ©
2008 Susan E. Haviland. The text of this article is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (January/February 2008): 16–32
Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0
John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler
John Seely Brown is a Visiting Scholar and Advisor
to the Provost at the University of Southern California (USC) and
Independent Co-Chairman of a New Deloitte Research Center. He is the
former Chief Scientist of Xerox and Director of its Palo Alto Research
Center (PARC). Many of his publications and presentations are on his
website (http://www.johnseelybrown.com).
Richard P. Adler is a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the
Future in Palo Alto and Principal of People & Technology, a
research and consulting firm in Cupertino, California.
Comments on this article can be posted to the web via the link at the bottom of this page.
More than one-third of the world’s population is
under 20. There are over 30 million people today qualified to enter a
university who have no place to go. During the next decade, this 30
million will grow to 100 million. To meet this staggering demand, a
major university needs to be created each week. —Sir John Daniel, 1996
The world has become increasingly “flat,” as Tom Friedman has shown.
Thanks to massive improvements in communications and transportation,
virtually any place on earth can be connected to markets anywhere else
on earth and can become globally competitive.1 But at the
same time that the world has become flatter, it has also become
“spikier”: the places that are globally competitive are those that have
robust local ecosystems of resources supporting innovation and
productiveness.2 A key part of any such ecosystem is a
well-educated workforce with the requisite competitive skills. And in a
rapidly changing world, these ecosystems must not only supply this
workforce but also provide support for continuous learning and for the
ongoing creation of new ideas and skills.
