(Note: Cross-posted at The Pulse) When we think about the potential effects of the Read/Write Web on education we are continually drawn to watching the way things are playing out outside of our focus, specifically in journalism, music, business and politics. In each of those arenas, the disruption that these changes (i.e. the easy creation and publishing of content) has been and continues to be great. You need look no further than the cell phone captured execution of Saddam Hussein to know that we are entering what will no doubt be an extremely interesting (to put it mildly) period that will push our thinking about privacy, communication, literacy and learning. Newspapers are struggling to navigate a world where we can all be journalists. Musicians are more and more going outside of the traditional steps to stardom, eliminating the middlemen and counting on the viral nature of the Web to find success. John Edwards, like him or not, recently announced his candidacy for president on YouTube. In case after case, the traditional models that have been increasingly used to lock down ideas and content are being challenged by a public that is becoming drunk with the power of publishing.

And so we often wonder how long it will take before our traditional concepts of schooling will also be significantly challenged by the shifts that a more co-operative rather than competitive Web environment is delivering. One obvious place where the disruption is especially transparent is the explosion of “open content” educational materials that are coming online every day. While the most obvious is the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative, which is providing the materials for over 1,600 courses free online, there are literally millions of pieces of valuable, solid content online that cobbled together could do a great job of replacing much of what we currently teach in schools.

In a presentation last fall, Todd Richmond, a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and the Center for Creative Technologies at USC, said that because of technologies that allow students to view powerful content online and then remix or reflect on that material by publishing their own reactions back to the world, “the previously strictly hierarchical relationships between teacher and learner are changing.” Richmond asks “How do motivated learners and skilled teachers make use of open educational resources to best achieve their aims?”

That is an important question for all of us in a world where there may be better content and better teachers outside of our classrooms that we can connect to for the benefit of our students’ learning. And it forces us to think disruptively about our traditional view of learning and teaching. As District Administration publisher Dan Kinnaman says in the latest issue:

An alarming reality for K12: Despite the radical transformation of data storage and information access, there has been no associated transformation of K12 education. Alarmingly, there may be no sector of society where technology has had less impact. That’s because K12 education persists in operating on the premise that to have school, you must physically co-locate teachers, students and curriculum materials. Teachers and students are assigned to stand-alone, self-contained school buildings that house paltry collections of mostly outdated curriculum materials. With rare exceptions, digital technologies and interactive communications are still largely peripheral to the primary activities of the typical school day. The premise that co-location is required is invalid, and we need to stop spending inordinate amounts of time, energy and money to maintain it as our fundamental operational structure.

That’s the disruption that we think about when trying to peer into the future. As more and more learning, powerful, passion-based learning becomes available outside the classroom, will the “perfect storm” (as Richmond calls it) for education finally arrive, forcing us, finally, to consider some radical re-envisioning of our classrooms?