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Now we’re trying the same trick with collaborative social technology, applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldnt solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the new socialism is bigger than we imagined.

via The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online .

This article neatly ties up a lot of the thoughts I’ve been rolling around. The big question is, how do we apply this logic to education? What do your SAT scores matter if you can’t collaborate with others? I’d like to make the terms ‘project’, ‘paper’ and ‘test’ synonymous with ‘group’.

And, I think ‘digital socialism’ is a much nicer term than ‘dot-communism’.

This NYTimes article, Psst! Need the Answer to No. 7? Just Click Here. Hits on the same idea, from a different angle:

Course Hero offers three million student-submitted items from 400,000 courses at more than 3,500 institutions, including lecture notes, study guides, presentations, lab results, research papers, essays and homework assignments. Users who submit such items can navigate the site free of charge; others pay a monthly fee. Mr. Kim declined to say how many users had registered beyond “hundreds of thousands” and said they included more than 1,000 professors using the site to refresh their teaching materials.

The emphasis is mine, but these professors are the ones who are seeing value in the network, and using it to better their own work.

It will be a defining shift in the education system, when sharing and cooperation are the norm for students.