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On Sputnik's 50th birthday remembering it inspired education
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| by NASA |
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On 4 October, 1957 - fifty years ago - humankind tossed its first orbiting object off the surface of Earth. The image above is from NASA, it is Sputnik 1. I have used some digital editing to add color to the original; digital editing was decades into the future when Sputnik launched. Sputnik 1 was only 23 inches in diameter. A New York Times interactive exhibit puts the dimensions into perspective.
We can think of the tiny orb as a blastosphere which contains, of course, the very beginnings of a new life - something that will diversify and grow and become incredibly complex. Click on this NASA link to listen to telemetry from Sputnik 1; you can hear what I suggest we can think of as coming from the blastosphere of the global information commons. Radio had brought sound “through the air waves” for several decades, but only by transmission from the ground or winged aircraft. The tiny object in the image above zoomed around the Earth beaming its beeps to anyone who could tune in - creating a completely new kind of open commons.
On the fiftieth birthday of Sputnik, I would like to reflect here on three ways in which Sputnik kicked off the 21st century's platform for a global learning commons, and how we can think and act to take advantage of the opportunities it brings.
The first aspect of the Commons is still keeping and increasing the push to use the marvelous interconnecting networks the blastosphere has become for global learning. While the increasingly mature global information commons encircles the Earth too many education resources are still stuck at the analog ground level.
The second way the Commons will be nurtured is by making certain everyone can tune in. While a billion or so of our six billion inhabitants use the Internet, there are billions more people to add. Focusing the student generation on equipping their mobile phones for learning is a way to leapfrog them into the developing learning commons.
The third aspect of the Commons that is crucial for education is making and keeping educational resources open. Fifty years ago the most dramatic change little Sputnik showed us was that we could all get the same information from a single source, and do so simultaneously. (We do exactly that when we click here to listen to Sputnik 1, across space and time.) When educational resources are open online, the promise of that future is fulfilled. Any isolation of learning resources within the information commons takes us back to the 20th Century's learning limitation. Before Sputnik it was geography that made it necessary to limit who could learn what, and where they could do it. Geography is no longer an excuse. There is no longer any excuse for excluding education resources from the global commons: they should be open.
Happy Birthday Sputnik!! Fifty years ago you inspired educators to teach science to a new generation. On your birthday you remind us that the world can change very quickly - that dreams are to be launched and orbited - as we are doing here in the Commons.
tags: new-york united states education sputnik learning open
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