My theme lately has been how the Internet is empowering the creative. As I flesh out this idea, I have been trying to see if there are any limits to that idea. It seems that age isn’t a limit of any kind.
Here is another story about kids who are using the Internet to learn and create. In this case they are creating apps for iDevices.
What is really interesting to me is what they are doing with their money. One kids said he was saving up for a house. Only one of them said they wanted to go to college (although in the article nobody explicitly said they would rule it out).
People like this blow holes in the standardized education model because it assumes the incomming students all have a fairly equal amount of knowledge. Teachers are already struggling to keep the advanced students interested and the struggling students motivated. The gap between the two will only increase in upcoming years. This also blows holes in the degree based college system. These students are going to want to take a number of different classes and learn a bunch of different skills. Steve Jobs did the same thing for the brief time he went to Stanford. He just attended classes he found useful, then dropped out.
You can’t expect success with a standardized education system with increasingly non standard students.
(I can’t embed it, but there is a video report on the website linked below. Just press the Video tab when you get there.)
-
App Developers Too Young to Drive – WSJ.com
-
Paul Dunahoo went on a business trip to San Francisco last week, where he attended technical sessions at Apple Inc.’s AAPL -0.13% developer conference, networked with other programmers and received feedback from Apple engineers on his six productivity apps.
-
Education Stormfront 
Leave a Reply