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he very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who’ve previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about. So instead of that free time seeping away in front of the television set, the cognitive surplus is going to be poured into everything from goofy enterprises like lolcats, where people stick captions on cat photos, to serious political activities like Ushahidi.com, where people report human rights abuses.

All the time that people devote to Wikipedia—which that guy considered weird and wasteful—is really a tiny portion of our worldwide cognitive surplus. It’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total.

Our third drive—our intrinsic motivation—can be even more powerful.

Shirky: Right—because television crowded out other forms of social engagement. Look, behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. So if you see people behaving in new ways, like with Wikipedia and whatnot, it’s very unlikely that their motivations have changed, because human nature doesn’t change that quickly. It’s quite likely that the opportunities have changed.

When we lacked the ability to efficiently connect and collaborate with each other, that intrinsic motivation often didn’t surface. So we assumed that productive, public activities revolved around extrinsic motivation and external rewards. And we assumed that all rewards were substitutable for all other rewards. So I can pay you more or I can praise you or I can put a Lucite brick on your desk and it all works the same way.

When Deci took people who enjoyed solving complicated puzzles for fun and began paying them if they did the puzzles, they no longer wanted to play with those puzzles during their free time. And the science is overwhelming that for creative, conceptual tasks, those if-then rewards rarely work and often do harm.

Pink: Yes, often these outside motivators can give us less of what we want and more of what we don’t want. Think about that study of Israeli day care centers, which we both write about. When day care centers fined parents for being late to pick up their kids, the result was that more parents ended up coming late. People no longer felt a social obligation to behave well. Shirky: If you assume bad faith from the average participant, you’ll probably get it. In social media, the design principle that has worked remarkably well is to treat good faith as the normal case and to regard defections from that as essentially a special case to be solved.

Shirky: Well, organizations that are founded to solve problems end up committed to the preservation of the problems. So Trentway-Wagar, an Ontario-based bus company, sues PickupPal, an online ride-sharing service, because T-W isn’t committed to solving transportation problems. It’s committed to solving transportation problems with buses. In the media world, Britannica is now committed to making reference works that can’t easily be referred to, and the music industry is now distributing music that can’t easily be shared because new ways of distributing music undermine the old business model.

At the start of each session, Mr. Campbell gave the 11 students a strange kind of pop quiz. For one thing, it was anonymous, so no grades were given. And rather than ask questions about the content of the homework, he asked students to detail how much time and effort they spent preparing for class. Among the questions: Did you talk to a classmate about the assignment? And how many hours did you spend on the reading?

The scores started low—between 4 and 5, meaning the students did far less than the assigned homework. Something happened as the term progressed, though, as students bought into the concept

"The commenting and linking are crucial," he says, "as those activities are essential parts of being in the real blogosphere."

If the core activity at college shifts away from the classroom and into practical activities, do students even need to come to a campus?

"There is definitely a broader array of options available to students who wish to forgo the commute to class altogether in exchange for online classes that essentially provide the same content that professors regurgitate to students in lecture."

The globalization of open learning systems characterized by cooperative resource creation, evaluation, and sharing will change how educational institutions view their roles and will offer new forms of value in the global learning ecosystem.

The result will be an emerging toolset for designing personalized, learner-centered experiences and environments that reflect the differentiation among learners instead of forcing compliance to an average learning style and level of performance.

As the hierarchical structure of education splinters, traditional top-down movements of authority, knowledge, and power will unravel. Before new patterns get established, it will seem as if a host of new species has been introduced into the learning ecosystem. Authority will be a hotly contested resource, and there will be the potential for conflict and distrust.

Learning geographies will be accessible to communities through a range of key tools, such as data aggregated from disparate sources, geo-coded data linking learning resources and educational information to specific community locations, and visualization tools that help communicate such information in easily understood visual and graphic forms. Such information will often contain multiple layers of data (for example, school performance statistics, poverty rates, and the degree of access to fresh food).

These new dimensions of learning geographies will require new core skills. Among them will be navigating new visual cartographies, identifying learning resources in previously unexpected places, leveraging networks to take advantage of learning opportunities, and creating flexible educational infrastructures that can make use of dispersed community resources. Through enhanced visibility and accessibility, learning geographies will bring new transparency to issues of equity in learning.