“Education for All” in a Connected World: A Social Technology-driven Framework for e-mobilizing Dormant Knowledge Capital through Sharism and Mass Collaboration

Abstract

In a digitally connected world, collaboration through the use of social technologies (enabling anytime-anywhere internet mediated communications) is giving rise to a new form of market where strangers exchange goods and services effortlessly (e.g Airbnb, Kickstarter, Lyft, etc). This brings about the concept of sharing/collaborative economy which includes shared creation, production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods, services and ideas by different people and organizations. The motivation and philosophy behind the collaborative building of value that results from sharing content and ideas is termed “sharism”. Billions of connected individuals can now actively participate in social development and they collectively have the capacity to solve social problems. Keeping this perspective in mind, the objective of this paper is to show, how sharism and mass collaboration using internet-mediated communications and social media have the possibility of solving one of the greatest problems of the world: delivering quality education for all. For this purpose, we propose and examine a framework for investigating how dispersed knowledge resources and wisdom of the senior citizens all over the world (the “dormant knowledge capital”) can be mobilized to improve the quality of education and learning outcome of the masses.