© 2008 John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler. Text illustrations © 2008 Susan E. Haviland. The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (January/February 2008): 16–32

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0

John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler

John Seely Brown is a Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost at the University of Southern California (USC) and Independent Co-Chairman of a New Deloitte Research Center. He is the former Chief Scientist of Xerox and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Many of his publications and presentations are on his website (http://www.johnseelybrown.com). Richard P. Adler is a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto and Principal of People & Technology, a research and consulting firm in Cupertino, California.

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More than one-third of the world’s population is under 20. There are over 30 million people today qualified to enter a university who have no place to go. During the next decade, this 30 million will grow to 100 million. To meet this staggering demand, a major university needs to be created each week. —Sir John Daniel, 1996

The world has become increasingly “flat,” as Tom Friedman has shown. Thanks to massive improvements in communications and transportation, virtually any place on earth can be connected to markets anywhere else on earth and can become globally competitive.¹ But at the same time that the world has become flatter, it has also become “spikier”: the places that are globally competitive are those that have robust local ecosystems of resources supporting innovation and productiveness.² A key part of any such ecosystem is a well-educated workforce with the requisite competitive skills. And in a rapidly changing world, these ecosystems must not only supply this workforce but also provide support for continuous learning and for the ongoing creation of new ideas and skills.