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so about seven months ago students of Hong Kong took to the streets in what's been called the umbrella revolution they were protesting the anti-democratic behavior of their government mostly around selecting candidates for an upcoming election now what makes this particular protest unique was the role that technology played in it what we see here is a candlelight vigil but it's actually a cellphone candlelight vigil and these cell phones in this light are more than symbolic they were actually the engines for this protest and what powered these engines was an app that was called fire chat now fire chats a chat app much like the app that's on your phone except when you chat with people on your phone it goes through the telecommunication networks and when you chat on your computer it goes through the internet but with fire chat it uses what's called mesh networks and the way it works is fire chat opens up and it looks for someone nearby you that also has fire chat and it does a Bluetooth connection to that phone then that person connects to someone else would fire a chat and that person connects to someone else and so on and so on and that network that connected network of phones is a mesh network and it exists temporarily just for that moment in time just those phones just those people and most importantly outside of the telecommunication system now why was this important for the protest it was important because the government can't control that network the government can't monitor that network the government can't censor that network now my question for you here today is this business do you think fire chat is in now if you looked up fire chat in the app store you would find it next to whatsapp or you might find it next to Twitter but actually the case I want to make for you here today is that fire chat is not in the business you think it's in that fire chat is actually in the business of disrupting the internet itself that fire chat is an alternative communication Network an alternative to the internet an alternative to telecom now my second example I want to talk about today is Tesla Tesla is probably considered one of the most successful electric car companies in history and this year they did something that was just unprecedented the took all their intellectual property all of their IP all of the patents all of their secrets and they put it out there for free anybody can have it now why would you do that right why would you take your core IP and put it out there for free and the answer for Tesla is the same answer as it was for firechat because they are not in the business you think they're in firechat and Tesla are not in the business that you want them to be in firechat and Tesla in fact when you think about Tesla Tesla is in a completely different business Tesla to understand it you just need to look at Elon Musk the founder of Tesla to understand that he is far more interested in disrupting NASA or Big Oil than the big automakers the business of Tesla is in is in power control power generation power storage power transmission or think about this man Xavier Neil Saviour Neil is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in France and about a year or so ago we started a school in France called Ecole 42 now Ecole 42 is a college that focuses on programming it's unique in three ways first it's entirely free you don't pay a dime secondly it has no teachers it uses what he calls peer-to-peer pedagogy and thirdly everyone who graduates has guaranteed a job now is he disrupting higher ed in France maybe but he too is not in the business that we think he's in why Xavier Neil does this is because he wants to jumpstart the entrepreneurial ecosystem of France he is in the business of startup technology that's the business he's in now consider a set of companies that we call the collaboration economy I'm probably the poster child for these is uber most of us know over is a transportation network it takes people who want to get a ride and people who have a ride they get together both of them benefit but uber is not about being a taxi company in fact uber is not in the taxi business at all they are not in the business you think they're in uber is about getting something from point A to point B anything on demand that business is called supply chain networks and that's the business they're disrupting not taxis or at the other end of the spectrum consider a company called Yertle now your tools a peer-to-peer marketplace for for free cycling so you've got something and you want to give it away you get onto urinal and you put it up there but Ural has its own currency it has what's called Ural dollars so you get your little dollars for the stuff you want to give away and then you use those Yertle dollars to get something else that someone else wants to give away it's literally a marketplace where you get what you give now those dollars don't translate to US Dollars they're their own currency the business Yertle is in is ostensibly markets but practically speaking they're creating an alternative currency they're disrupting central banks or consider space monkey space monkey is an external hard drive you get it it sits on your desktop it does all that stuff external hard drives do it backs up your computer it stores your files but it's got this extra little hard drive in there and what it does is it connects to other hard drives in other space monkey machines all over the internet and it takes your stuff and it breaks it up into itty-bitty little bits and spreads it across the internet and backs it up so that when your hard drive fails or you're not around your hard drive you can just access your information now is space monkey in the business that you think they're in no they're not they're not in the hard drive business they're about disrupting cloud computing they're competing with Google they're competing with the Amazon Cloud my last example is Bitcoin Bitcoin we've all heard of it's this alternative currency people use it instead of dollars but really to understand Bitcoin you got to understand how it works it uses this thing called the blockchain and the blockchain is this network of people and computers that's a crowd all across the internet and what the blockchain does is it verifies exchanges in other words when two people want to exchange something the blockchain makes sure that the person who has one side of that exchange has what they need and the person on the other side has what they need and it verifies that it's not just about financial exchange in fact a few weeks ago the blockchain verified a wedding the blockchain can verify any exchange so what is Bitcoin disrupting is it disrupting currency certainly but what bitcoin is really about is disrupt any institution that validates exchange right that's government's that's what bitcoin are that's what bitcoin is disrupting right governments so if we think about all the different companies I've talked about here today uber and Yertle space monkey Bitcoin all of them I've been talking about there are two common themes that I want to focus on all of these companies are collaborative in their processes and mesh in their structure I must say that again their collaborative in their process their mesh in their structure now let's look at the industry that I'm in I'm in higher education right higher education we've been having some problems in trying to adjust to this new economy as well and a lot of these problems were identified 40 years ago when Alvin Toffler talked about what he calls the 800th lifetime that if we looked at all the new information being created there would be this point this demarcation line after which all of this new one will become so large that no one person could actually process that information that point is called the eight hundred and first lifetime the problem is higher education is designed for the first eight hundred lifetimes it was designed in the 1800s it's this German model that's all about the Industrial Revolution it's all about those eight hundred lifetimes and once we hit that eight hundred and first lifetime the cracks around the seams of higher Ed's start to crumble because it just doesn't work anymore because now what we need to think about is filter right and what we're facing is what Clay Shirky calls filter failure and the filter failure around this rise in information is to be placed at the doorstep that blame at the doorstep of higher education because it's still using a model that's simply untenable in the face of these things and all of the time we're doing this we're doing exactly what every institution does when faced with tectonic change we're keep doing the stuff we've been doing all along right we like doubled down on it we said okay we see all this stuff happening we're just going to move our courses online we're gonna digitize our lectures we're gonna put our stuff on the Internet and when that didn't work we said well we'll just replicate our classrooms but with replication instead of revolution we just fail faster and along the way as we're doing this all of these education startups start coming up and they're driving the price of what we do down to zero so now the challenge for higher education is how do we do what Kevin Kelly calls better than free how can we make higher education better than free and the answer to that is that we have to recognize that we too are not in the business you think we're in we need to be taking cues from companies like Bitcoin and uber and space monkey and Tesla and thinking differently about what we do we need to look at education as a collaborative network and as mission structure we need to do what I call mesh education we need to build platforms that allow learners to collaborate as they choose and create ad hoc networks that come together and come apart not university systems and silos and structures that are fixed we need to create the 21st century conditions for learning a petri dish if you will you know example of this is Minecraft and I know you're thinking isn't that a game but it's not a game minecraft in fact is exactly an example of this petri dish I'm talking about minecraft is a collaborative platform that's all it is it's a place for people to collaborate and they are collaborating to learn trust me you can learn about history math programming genomics all of these things in Minecraft and they're learning not from teachers not the way you think of teachers they're just learning from each other and minecraft is also an ad hoc network minecraft doesn't have a fixed and formal network any minecraft computer can connect to another one and create a network on demand it's the perfect example of what I mean when I say mesh education so then is there any role for teachers what is the role for higher education in this space well there is but now the role is to create these collaborative platforms to manage them to direct them to participate in them to help design them to put guide roles rails that keep people from going off the edges of them our job is to help create these ad-hoc networks and make them fluid so things can come together and break apart as needed there still is a role for an institution in this place even all the examples I'm talking about today like IHS still requires some sort of institution in fire chat they validate accounts to make sure people are who they say they are or an uber they go through background checks of drivers to make sure that they're safe to drive cars in Bitcoin there are Bitcoin miners that validate the actual exchange to make sure that it's a legitimate exchange there's always a role for an institution with these just not in the way that you would normally think so when we and Armstrong Institute for interactive media studies here thought about how we do this how do we change what we do we thought about what mesh education might look like and we think it looks a lot like this you should be able to look at a mesh education space and ask are these teachers or are these students which one is this a business or is this a company is this a research lab or is this a classroom if the space truly is collaborative and it's processes and mesh in its structure you shouldn't be able to tell the difference between either of those things now the last startup I want to talk about here today this one didn't do so well this one failed the government actually shut this one down so there were these six guys all about 30 years old or so they got sick of higher education as it's been they took it completely out of an education space and they dropped it into a social space they got rid of curriculum and they made it all about interaction the government shut them down now the founder is this guy on the left and a start-up was called the Plato Academy the point being this isn't new mesh education and these concepts aren't new but what happened between Plato and now as all these institutions started to get in the way all these structures all these beliefs all these standards and all of these things that we thought were making things better but ended up simply making things worse getting in the way now in the web 3.0 world there's this path through this there's this path towards creating more effective more democratic and more open types of education mesh education allows you to do that and so if higher education is going to endure then it needs to embrace these things it needs to grab on to them it needs to build them it needs to help them grow and our jobs as educators are to do that and in doing so realized that we too are not in the business that we think we're in we're not in the business of teaching we're in the business of making meaning thank you