The Digital Trinity

In my recent Internet wanderings I got lost on a click-through walkabout and came across an idea that Christopher Surdak calls the "Digital Trinity": Social Media, Mobility, and Data Analytics make up a trifecta of influences that are changing the way we think and behave as consumers. The original piece is probably a little tl;dr for casual readers, but I'll summarize it here. Writing from a business perspective, Surdak identifies six impacts of the trinity on consumers:

1. Quality (Consumers expect the best and it's easy to switch to a competitor if they aren't getting the best.)
   
2. Ubiquity (Consumers expect what they want, when they want it, wherever they want it.)
   
3. Immediacy (On second thought, "when they want it" isn't good enough -- consumers want it before they even realize they want it.)
   
4. Disengagement (And they don't care how companies make it happen -- the ends justify the means.)
   
5. Intimacy (Surdak calls it "creepy-intimacy," and if you've gotten any Google targeted ads in your web searches recently, you know exactly what he's talking about.)
   
6. Purpose (Above all of this, consumers still feel a deep need for purpose and value companies that help them pursue their purpose.)

So what are the implications of these ideas for the consumerization of the classroom? In many ways, our students are consumers. They come into the classroom with expectations that instruction will be delivered flawlessly, that they'll have access to their materials anytime, anywhere, and that they're entitled to know why it all matters to them. Their parents share these expectations.

Whether you agree that these are reasonable expectations really doesn't matter; what does matter is that it's a near-certainty that our public schools aren't going to be able to keep up with them without a radical paradigm shift. Instead, schools like High Tech High and AltSchool are emerging as alternatives, promising things like "micro-school communities" and "personalization, adult world connection, common intellectual mission, and teacher as designer."