In the first few internships I had in college, the easy early impact I had was in the realm of the technology used to run the business.  The fact that I was a digital native made it easy for me to quickly understand the system and use it in ways that the existing staff hadn’t yet been able to pick up.   It’s not that I was inherently ‘smarter’ or ‘better’, it’s just that I was much more familiar with technology – this effect is just going to accelerate as we get older.

Education is often criticized for being ‘too conceptual’, or not teaching the concepts or skills that are really necessary to excel in the workplace or real world.  The second exciting thing about technology crashing into education is that the tools that are being developed for use in the classroom are identical to those that workers in the real world need to master.

Being able to read a textbook and regurgitate information is not something I’ve really had to do since I left college, but learning how to quickly search for and find relevant information is one of the most important skills I have.  Think about how vital skills like digital communication and collaboration will be in a global economy that teams us with people across oceans and expects us to be just as productive as if they were sitting next to us.  Managing your online brand is another expertise that countless future presidential hopefuls are going to wish they’d developed a few years before those pictures of them appeared on Facebook.

How novel that the tools we’re using to educate end up being the same tools we’ll need to perform.