A recent New York Times article discussed the concept of co-working spaces where people congregate to learn from and work with another. Sometimes, the people in these places may be collaborating on a project or they may be individuals sharing a space while doing their own work. While the life-span of co-working spaces may be short-lived in some cases, they offer those who work there the benefits of being around other people and the creative interchange that can result. As the media pundit Clay Shirky said, “we systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.”
As I thought about the kind of work spaces we wish to create in this age of twenty-four/seven technological access, I also wondered how schools can prepare students for this new type of work environment. It seems that at times we want the best of both worlds: we want our children to have full access to technology in our schools so they can learn how to work in a wired world, but we also want them to be able to interact with and enjoy the company of others in real time. We wish them to be facile in the virtual and real world; consequently, we must help them learn how to navigate different contexts and communities.
Over the years, it seems like there has been a reaction among parents to the aspiration a decade ago for students to be on laptops for a significant part of their school day. More and more, we hear from parents that they don’t want their children to be on a computer all day, and I wonder if this is a response to the ubiquity of technological devices in the lives of our children. When many, many children have a laptop, an iPad, or a Smartphone, and they spend a great deal of time on the device at home, it’s no longer quite so exciting from a parent perspective to walk into a classroom and see every child looking at a screen and typing. Perhaps, we hope to right a pendulum that may have swung too far in the direction of technological devices. As we design our schools and plan our programs, we should strike to maintain a balance. This does not make one a Luddite: it speaks to the wish that children spend as much time with their peers in face to face dialogue as they do on Facebook.
Maybe the development of concepts like co-working spaces represent our desire to maintain some of our social nature of which Plato spoke while having access to the wonders of the web. Possibly, it is the combination of the two that will make us more productive workers and better people. As Tina Roth Eisenberg says in the article, “I just like being around nerdy creative people all day long. It helps make sense of all the information coming at us.”
