Thought this was worth thinking about.
One of the things that Shirkey writes about is how the new social tools and the powerline graph of user use / success / downloads / etc… has meant that there is no longer a high cost of failure. He uses SourceForge and MeetUp as two examples where if a software project or a meeting fails, there’s no real loss, because there is no institutional infrastructure that is lost along with it. On an institutional level, schools have an incredible infrastructure that makes them hard to change, but that’s really not the big problem when we question the change through this lens.
The big problem is that we never, ever have a low cost of failure. When schools fail, kids lose.