This morning everyone on the Mozilla Drumbeat list serv (basically, anyone can be on this list who wants to be) was invited to come up with a Masthead slogan for the new Drumbeat website, in the aftermath of our spectacular festival in Barcelona on “Learning, Freedom, and the Open Web.”   Building on lots of other good suggestions, I came up with “Think Big.  Build Open.  Power Everyone.”   What that means to those not in the open web community, is that we use the model of open contribution for the biggest and most important learning, educational, and social purposes—and that works by having free and open platforms (like Mozilla itself or Wikipedia) that anyone can contribute to and that empowers everyone.

In a nutshell, that is the method that I use in my teaching and that I think needs to reshape our educational institutions for a digital age.   We have lots of hierarchical, closed systems divided up in specialized fields and disciplines, all inspired by the divisions of labor and task necessary for the industrial age.   We’re in a new age now and we need institutions that inspire us and support us and help us learn how to (you guessed it):  Think Big.  Build Open.  Power Everyone.