Disrupting class - school on your mobile

I had the opportunity this summer to visit Boston USA and Harvard with my family for a holiday. Among many other enjoyable activities we also dipped into a local bookstore. I noticed Clayton Christensen´s latest book (co-authored by Michael B Horn and Curtis W. Johnsson): Disrupting Class – how disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns.

New technologies can cause great (i.e. usually big) companies to fail. The logic is excellently described in the theory of disruptive technologies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology). There are already several reviews on Christensen’s latest the book (an interesting review at e.g. http://www.edutopia.org/student-centric-education-technology). Christensen’s book left me with some impressions, observations and suggestions, which emerge from my background as an innovator and pioneer of the mobile internet and which I would like to share with my readers.

In my PhD thesis I studied the emergence of the mobile internet market (http://www.smartmobs.com/2006/12/12/thesis-on-email-scale-free-networks-and-the-mobile-internet/ ) and argued that the mobile internet market, should migrate toward flat rate tariffs and toward applications like mobile email, but that the market is locked in by network externalities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_externalities) to using applications like the text message - SMS - and locked into a business model of transaction based pricing. I argued that network externalities can slow down the emergence of disruptive innovations and in some cases completely prevent the emergence of disruptive innovations.

Changing the way we learn is a social issue and thus Christensen is for the first time to my knowledge, applying his theory of disruptive innovations into a community context i.e. an environment, which one would suppose is full of lock-in situations created by network externalities. Regulations and laws create very strong lock-in situations. To my surprise, this did not turn out to be a major problem in the school environment: governments change and policies change and thus schools also can change and in fact have changed. The lock-in created by policy is in some cases actually far weaker than a lock in created by a technology platform and users that lock each other into a technology platform by network externalities.

Christensen’s observation in disrupting class is very simple: we each learn in different ways and computer software can be tailored to different learning methods. Computer software can enable student centric learning.

Christensen argues that applying the theory of disruptive innovation means addressing a market of non consumption. Do not try to change the existing classroom, change will be slow and the main stream will do its upmost to prevent change. Instead address a market, which is presently small and which is not on the agenda of the mainstream market.

This is sound advice. In my native context Finland, this could mean e.g. addressing the adult learner market. The adults have a problem fitting fixed class room schedules into their business schedules and have thus not really had the opportunity to become consumers of learning, although the need clearly exists. Computer enabled virtual learning environments will create new markets simply because it will enable flexible scheduling. There are also other interesting areas of non-consumption.

The case of the disk drive industry, the original case in Christensen´s theory, shows that disruptive innovations, some times emerge, because of changes, which happen in other parts of the value chain. The disk drive industry changed because of an emerging demand for lap top computers. Christensen, in his book disrupting class also points out issues relating to the value chain: traditional book publishers will probably not be interested in new computer based methods. One should also look at other emerging players in the value chain. I would find distributors of software e.g. game distributors interesting.

The other night I was testing my son’s Swedish vocabulary knowledge. I was also trying to understand the way he learns and how I could adapt to it or how could technology adapt to it. The mobile value chain is changing. The latest mobile phones and operator subscriptions have flat rate access to the internet. On the Internet we have applications like Wikipedia and some forms of network dictionaries. What if I – or somebody else - developed an Internet application, a “wikidictionary”. Then we would ask the schools to insert the wikidictionary platform with e.g. Finnish words and their Swedish equivalent. Remembering that there are about 60 000 kids in their ninth grade in Finland, the task of inserting could be shared and completed in a week. A few weeks from now, my son would, when sitting in his bus, on his way to school, ask his mobile (internet) to quiz him for his Swedish vocabulary.

We parents already have our mobile office. I invite you to share ideas and create a mobile school for our children.

Ville Saarikoski
Helsinki, Friday November 14 th 2008