If Silicon Valley is to become the Las Vegas of Innovation it has to improve the local public schools
Following my participation in the recent Cisco panel on education and healthcare, I was inspired to spill some digital ink. I proposed helping schools use simple, inexpensive collaborative technologies to access the resources all around them, as well as within the school system, to create an environment of educational excellence.
Since then, lots of our readers have jumped in by sending in ideas and even offering technology and time, to improve the sorry state of Bay Area/Silicon Valley public schools.
There are tremendous capital, material and intellectual resources within a 30 minute car ride of any public school here. We just need to connect them up with a Craig's List type of online community built around every school.
Let's help the schools use open software and hardware, blogging software, wikis, and social networking software--all of which we have in abundance--and let's see if these technologies are game-changing technologies (as they appear to be.)
Silicon Valley survival
If Silicon Valley is going to survive and prosper, it has to become the premium brand of innovation. Otherwise it will lose ground to centers of innovation in the US and around the world.
Silicon Valley has to follow the Las Vegas strategy.
When Indian casinos appeared within a couple of hours' drive from any large population center, Las Vegas didn't die. It scrambled up the value stack.
It built grander structures and dreamlike scenarios of pirate ships battling. Amid the cannon smoke the Eiffel Tower can be seen, and the skyline of New York City...and Camelot is in the distance.
Silicon Valley needs to scramble up the value stack and become the premium brand of innovation, by building ever grander structures of imagination and dreaming big, big dreams of better worlds.
Silicon Valley cannot become the premium brand of innovation, and it cannot claim that the future is invented here, if it continues to tolerate such atrocious public schools. This is not the future ...(right?).
Because otherwise the world will see that maybe the technology-driven future is all about ignorance in the local public schools, and ignorance of the problem by elite local business communities. That could lead to substantial and lengthy pushback....and that's not good for markets...(right?).
That's why the future is clear: every Bay Area/Silicon Valley school, public or private, becomes a showcase of educational excellence. And it is all made possible because of the power of Silicon Valley's innovation and innovators.
