A few years ago, I was teaching English in a high school in the far west of China. We had fifty students to a class, sixteen classes to a year group, many of them boarders. At the back of each classroom were half a dozen flashlights of the sort you might keep in the boot of your car. One day, a colleague asked his students about these. “They are for when we study at night,” came the reply. “At midnight, the lights go off. After that, you have to use a torch.”
When Rayhan Haque writes that China and India are in “hot pursuit” of Britain, this is what the skills race looks like on the ground.
The good news is that the kind of internet-powered “revolution in skills” he proposes is already under way – among other places, in the form of two projects which I have been involved in founding.
School of Everything – which launched in September 2008 – has many of the features of the “social-exchange forum” he describes, allowing people to offer skills and connect with others to arrange face-to-face teaching and learning. So far, the site has over 15,000 members, with hundreds of connections made through it every week. Some lead to paid teaching, others to informal skill-sharing. (Although Haque perhaps underestimates the difficulty of brokering direct exchanges, since these require a match of skills and needs from both parties: if I want to learn ukelele and can teach Khmer, I must not only find a uke player, but a uke player planning a holiday in Cambodia!).
What is surely true is that current economic conditions add to the significance of services like School of Everything. In the good times, social networking was something you did when the boss wasn’t looking: a mixture of throwing sheep at each other and getting contacted by long lost school friends. Today, this web of contacts and resources may make all the difference to how people weather the recession. Look at the jobs section of a site like the Sheffield Forum and you will find a whole layer of informal information sharing, of a kind which didn’t exist during previous surges in unemployment.
It is not just that people are used to relying on the internet as a source of information. A significant proportion of the population is now comfortable using online tools to organise their offline lives – whether that means finding a partner through a dating site, organising a party over Facebook or using Meetup to start a local French conversation club. Can similar tools help people cope with the recession? Services like Freecycle or LiftShare certainly offer possibilities for those living on reduced budgets. In Brighton, meanwhile, people are collaborating through Facebook and Flickr to map empty shops and organise projects to make new use of them.
Significantly, it is those most at home in the world of social networking sites who are being worst hit by this recession. Youth unemployment in the UK is already running at over 16 per cent and those leaving school, college or university this summer will face the toughest job market in a generation. So it is with this group particularly in mind that the other site I’m working on was conceived. Signpostr.com is a site for anyone not in secure employment. The idea is to create a space where people can talk honestly about their situation, help each other find and map useful resources, as well as starting new projects and getting them off the ground.
The internet won’t offer easy solutions for combating the recession or winning the global skills race – and government is still learning how to make effective use of its potential. However, given how far it has already transformed our daily activities, this technology arguably represents the most significant change in society since the last major downturn. At a time when we need all the tools available to soften the social impact of that economic crisis, I am convinced that sites like School of Everything and Signpostr have an important part to play.