The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age

This John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Report isa redaction of the argument in our book-in-progress, currentlytitled The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.That book, to be published in 2010, is merely the concrete(paper and online) manifestation and culmination of a long,complex process that brought together dozens of collaborators,face to face and virtually. The focus of all of this intense interchangewas the shape and future of learning institutions. Ourcharge was to accept the challenge of an Information Age andacknowledge, at the conceptual as well as at the methodologicallevel, the responsibilities of learning at an epistemic momentwhen learning itself is the most dramatic medium of that change.Technology, we insist, is not what constitutes the revolutionarynature of this exciting moment. It is, rather, the potential forshared and interactive learning that Tim Berners-Lee and otherpioneers of the Internet built into its structure, its organization,its model of governance and sustainability.