Media Mentions

The following is a list of all media items featuring TakingITGlobal. If you'd like to add a media mention, let us know!

TakingITGlobal mentioned in Don Tapscott's latest book

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything - December 28, 2006
TakingITGlobal has been recognized as "one of the world' best examples of how N-Geners are using digital technologies to transform the world around them" in Don Tapscott's latest book, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Founders Jennifer Corriero and Michael Furdyk were asked by this leading business strategist to reflect on why TakingITGlobal differs from other social networking sites on the web and how interactivity promotes a new paradigm in education.

The following is an excerpt from Wikinomics:

(Page 50-51)
Changing the World -- One Peer at a Time

The media (and parents) frequently express alarm at the shallowness of MySpace. How can you have one thousand friends, they ask? Surely most of this is superfluous. But not all social networks are for swapping photos, gawking at friend lists, or sharing music files in peer-to-peer networks.

TakingITGlobal is one of the world' best examples of how N-Geners are using digital technologies to transform the world around them. With 110,000 registered members in nearly two hundred countries, a Web site in seven languages, and five million unique visitors, one could mistake TakingITGlobal for the United Nations. In a sense, you wouldn't be wrong. After all, its members run shoulders with business and government leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos and the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Plus the site lists over two thousand youth-initiated and-managed community action projects that tackle tough issues ranging from closing the digital divide in rural India to preventing HIV in Uganda.
This United Nations is run not by senior diplomats, but entirely by young people aged thirteen to twenty-four years old.

Like MySpace and Facebook, TakingITGlobal harnesses all of the latest tools, such as blogging, instant messaging, and media sharing. But it promotes a decidedly different kind of social networking. Rather than list their favorite movie stars and music tracks, members list information about the languages they speak, the countries they have visited, and the issues that they're most concerned about. Members link to other members' profiles when they share similar interests, and those links create social connections that lead to new friendships and projects. Cofounder Jennifer Corriero calls TakingITGlobal "a platform to support collaboration among young people in developing projects, in understanding and grappling with issues, and influencing the decision-making processes, especially around those issues that are directly affecting young people."

Corriero and her partner, Michael Furdyk, started working full force on TakingITGlobal in September 2000. They got support form public and private sponsors, and by early 2001 the site was up and running and quickly gathering members. Today the site and all of its activities are coordinated by a worldwide virtual network of young people. A small Toronto-based team of fifteen manages the core organization, but Furdyk and Corriero rely on volunteers for everything else. "Hundreds of people around the world have a stake in it, have some ownership in it, and collaborate every day in making it work", says Corriero.

TakingITGlobal's next task: reforming education. Ask Furdyk why educations systems around the Western world are failing, not surprisingly, you won't get a conventional answer. It's not all down to undisciplined students, underperforming teachers, or toothless standards. According to Furdyk, the real problem is a lack of engaging content.

Academic studies over the last thirty years show that young people's interest and enthusiasm in schoolwork has declined precipitously. "Everything else has become so engaging," says Furdyk. N-Geners who go online regularly to play video games or interact on MySpace expect better experiences in the classroom. Look at today's curriculum, though, and you won't find much interactivity. "We're still learning through reading and regurgitating," says Furdyk.

TakingITGlobal's answer is a set of tools and curricular activities that will get students collaborating with other students in other countries to complete projects, and learning through active projects that make a difference in their communities. "It's real participatory, active learning," says Furdyk. "A teacher in Canada and a teacher in Nigeria sign up, create a virtual classroom, and assign students to group research projects, while the students can blog, post artwork, and collaborate on a class wiki." With the assistance of Microsoft, the project will be in classrooms across North America by 2008.

If N-Geners can transform the future of the education system, what else is next? Well, how about the entire economy, for starters.

© Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Portfolio Hardcover, 2006.