Stephen Downes

Again, from the perspective of the role of educational institutions, consider the following: "We may be building the engines of extraordinary productivity, but we are not yet building the social machinery that will make that productivity broadly usable and broadly beneficial. We are just hoping that they somehow evolve." What do we (as educators) need to do to redefine ourselves to address this? Tim O'Reilly argues, "decentralized architectures are more innovative and more competitive than those that are centralized. Decentralization creates value; centralization captures it." As money becomes tighter, institutions are beginning to specialize and centralize. That strikes me as exactly the wrong response in a world in which centralization is pushing us increasingly toward precarity.