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Edge is different from the Algonquin Roundtable or Bloomsbury Group, but it offers the same quality of intellectual adventure. Closer resemblances are the early seventeenth-century Invisible College, a precursor to the Royal Society. Its members consisted of scientists such as Robert Boyle, John Wallis, and Robert Hooke. The Society's common theme was to acquire knowledge through experimental investigation. Another inspiration is The Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal club of the leading cultural figures of the new industrial age — James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood, Joseph Priestly, and Benjamin Franklin. The online salon at Edge.org is a living document of millions of words charting the Edge conversation over the past fifteen years wherever it has gone. It is available, gratis, to the general public.

Edge.org offers "open-minded, free ranging, intellectually playful ... an unadorned pleasure in curiosity, a collective expression of wonder at the living and inanimate world ... an ongoing and thrilling colloquium." 

encourages people who can take the materials of the culture in the arts, literature, and science and put them together in their own way. We live in a mass-produced culture where many people, even many established cultural arbiters limit themselves to secondhand ideas, thoughts, and opinions. Edge.org consists of individuals who create their own reality and do not accept an ersatz, appropriated reality. The Edge community consists of peole who are out there doing it rather than talking about and analyzing the people who are doing it.

Given the growing momentum of these trends, what does it mean for students, teachers, schools, and the education community at large? Collaborating and customizing. Educators are learning to work together, with their students, and with other experts in creating content, and are able to tailor it to exactly what they need. Critical thinking. Students are learning how to effectively find content and to discern reliable sources. Democratizing education. With Internet access becoming more ubiquitous, the children of the poorest people are able to get access to the same quality education as the wealthiest. Changing the textbook industry. Textbook publishers are finding ways to make themselves relevant to their digital audience. Emphasizing skills over facts. Curriculum incorporates skill-building.

With the explosion of online learning, a disruptive innovation, there has been significant attention paid to the likely unbundling of higher education (see Michael Staton’s AEI piece and this University Ventures Fund piece, for example). We’ve written about unbundling ourselves. In every industry, the early successful products and services often have an interdependent architecture—meaning that they tend to be proprietary and bundled. The reason for this is that when a technology is immature, in order to make the products reliable or powerful enough so that they will gain traction, an entity has to wrap its hands around the whole system architecture so that it can wring out every ounce of performance.