Steve Kinney

In a recent posting, I mentioned the “Ingenuity Age.” Vicki Davis asked me where this term came from. In truth, it came from an accident. I had planned to write “Information Age,” but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. The term didn’t fit. I had to come up with a new one on the spot.

The wording itself was adapted from Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book, The Ingenuity Gap — which I’ll talk about in another post. The concept however draws equally from the work of Malcolm Gladwell, James Surowiecki, Chip and Dan Heath, and Seth Godin among many others.

The Industrial Age had us working in factories. We stood on assembling lines. We mastered our craft and repeated it. Education was there with rote memorization and repetitive tasks.

The Information Age had us working offices. We sat in cubicles. We processed large amounts of information and made sense of it. We organized information in well-defined categories. Education was there with refined comprehension skills and an emphasis on algebraic thinking.

As the amount of information increased, our attention span decreased.

Enter the Ingenuity Age. Problems have become more complex and require a greater amount of insight to solve. In this era, the main commodity is not information, but ideas.

Ideas are the bread and butter of the Ingenuity Age.

P.S. — Check out Vicki Davis’s most recent post on the Cool Cat Teacher Blog.

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