Kids and a “Cognitive Surplus”

I begin with a grateful nod to Clay Shirky’s recent speech about cognitive surplus, in which he talks about the immense quantities of time people have been spending doing passive things like watching television, and how those passive activities are starting to be replaced by Web 2.0-style activities in which people are creating instead of merely consuming.  As Shirky says (from the above link):

“Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One percent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?”

Three years ago, my math company ran a scholarship contest where students could enter a one-page essay about why they loved mathematics.  The best essay was to win $500, and two $250 runner-up prizes were also awarded.  What happened next amazed me: over 25,000 kids submitted essays, and the vast majority of them were thoughtful and had clearly taken significant time and effort.  Even if we assume each essay took just half an hour to write, that’s still 12,500 hours of essay writing that was done to win a grand total of $1000.  That works out to 8 cents an hour, on average, that those essay writers were earning.  I thought to myself at the time that I wished I could somehow channel that same cost-to-work ratio in other meaningful ways.

Now, as Shirky points out, even the 8 cents isn’t necessary.  This blog post is a perfect example: I’m writing this, for free, instead of watching TV right now.  Why?  Shirky’s paragraphs above answer that question: simply because I can.

Let’s turn this same concept back to the main topic of this blog: education.  I believe that children are even more inclined to be producers — to subscribe to Web 2.0 mentality — than adults.  As I write this, there is a vast social surplus for children that is left virtually untapped.  At school, for example, children are too often treated as passive learners rather than active creators.  Summer vacation is by far the most glaring cognitive surplus of all — here is a stretch of 2.5 months out of each and every year where we could be helping kids to develop a mindset of actively creating and inventing (and the topic could be anything: songs, stories, websites, artwork, products to sell, or ways to help others).  Note that I’m not merely talking about signing your kid up for photography camp, soccer camp, and art camp — although these can all be good things — but I’m talking about all of us as parents and educators intentionally helping to speed the Web 2.0 phenomenon of kids seeing themselves as active creators of ideas that matter.

Back to Shirky:

“We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.”

Education emphatically meets exactly those criteria.  How can we tap into the cognitive surplus that exists here, both in and outside of school?